Speak Cells

Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast, episode 2039 - Avoid Whiplash with Speak Cells!

There you have it, all 40 tips podcast, check that playlist in the top-right hand corner, click the “i”!

Hey, welcome back to MrExcel netcast, I'm Bill Jelen. Well I usually do a 3.5 hour Excel seminar, and towards the end I do this joke, I first introduce the joke. I say “Every once in a while we have data that's just on paper, and there's no way to get that data other than to key the data, and then we have to proof the data, right?” So now, you're looking at the screen and then looking at the paper, looking at the screen, look in the paper, you're going to get whiplash going back and forth, well there's an amazing feature built into Excel. Now it's hidden, you have to come up here to the Quick Access Toolbar, right-click and say Customize Quick Access Toolbar, of course is not any of these 40 popular commands here. You have to go to All Commands or Commands Not in the Ribbon, I love that one, that sounds so mysterious, things that they have in Excel that they're hiding from us. And you go down to the S's, down to Speak Cells, and you click 5 times to add those icons. What you do is you select some cells, and choose the first icon which is called Speak Cells: “Pivot Table Data Crunching”, “Excel Gurus Gone Wild”, “Guerilla Data Analysis Using Microsoft Excel”, “M is for Data Monkey”.

Alright, there you have it, 5 icons, the second icon, if you'd actually selected million cells and have it start speaking, click the second icon, it's called Stop Speaking. Frankly I wish some of my co-workers would have this icon on their forehead. The next one says we're going to read down column A then column B then column C; this says Read across row 1 then row 2 then row 3. Now my pro-tip here is to come to the Control Panel, type in Speech, go to Change Text to Speech Settings, this is where we have the voice, right? So here in this operating system I have Microsoft Anna, but you can change the speed, alright, it’s about 125% or so, click OK, we'll have the voice read faster: “Pivot Table Data Crunching”, “Excel Gurus Gone Wild”, “Guerilla Data Analysis Using Microsoft Excel”, “M is for Data Monkey”. Find the right setting so it doesn't sound too cartoonish, but yet it's still fast enough, so that way you can keep your eye on the paper, and it will read to you. Alright, there you go, all 40 tips, we podcast it all of August and September and now into October, they're all in this book, this is the guide to the last 66 podcast episodes, everything's in there. $10 is an e-book, $25 is a print book, click the “i” on the top-right hand corner, beautiful guide to all of these tips. Those 65 episodes with probably 10 things each, you know, over 500 tips right there in the palm of your hand.

OK, episode recap: Sometimes you have to keep data from a piece of paper, you want to proof-read that data in Excel, you get a whiplash going back and forth between the screen and paper. Right-click, Customize Quick Access Toolbar, and choose Customize from the top-left dropdown, and choose Commands Not in the Ribbon or All Commands. Scroll down to the S's, down to Speak Cells, click Add 5 times, select some cells, click Speak Cells, and it will read those to you, you can keep your eye on the paper then. The second icon Stops Speaking, that's if you accidentally selected a million cells, you can also press Escape, I joke there are some coworkers should have the Stop Speaking on their forehead. You can control if they read down the column or across the rows, and then you can speed up the voice in the Control Panel.

You're hearing there Microsoft Anna is the voice in Windows 7, that voice changes in each version of Windows. I remember Microsoft Sam back in the old days, sounded like a computer, Microsoft Anna actually sounds pretty good. So kudos to whoever the Speech team is for improving a feature that most people don't even realize is there.

Alright well hey, I want to thank you for stopping by, we’ll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel!