I’m a big fan of text-to-speech technology, mainly because it doesn’t work very well. However, this is sometimes useful in certain situations.
Excel has a lot of features, including the Speak Cells feature, which basically lets you pass your selected cells to the text-to-speech engine. It’s a great accessibility tool – when my eyes get too tired to read cells on a computer screen, I just let Excel read the values ??out loud for me.
Enable Speak Cells in Excel
It is not easy to access from the Excel menu by default, so a little tweak is required on the Quick Access Toolbar. First open the Quick Access Toolbar, then select More Commands:
From the Select Commands From drop-down list, select All Commands, then choose Speak Cells commands.
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Be sure to select all of the Speak Cells commands so they are added to your menu:
Click OK to apply the changes. Buttons should appear in the menu:
To use the commands, select the cells you want to read, then click the Speak Cells button.
The computer voice will speak the values ??of the cells you selected. By default, it will read them line by line. To switch between dubbing by row or by column, simply click the respective buttons as shown in the screenshot above.
These two buttons act like a switch. Only one is active, so when you click on one of them, the other is disabled. Also, the last button is the Speak Cells As I Type option. When you click on this button, it will speak any cell when you press the Enter key.
Overall, it does a pretty good job of reading text, especially if you’re using a newer version of Windows and Office like Windows 10 or Office 2016. Here’s an audio sample of Excel reading four lines in my Excel spreadsheet.
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This is one of the best accessibility features in Microsoft Excel. This function helps me validate data in cases where I am too tired to accurately read the values ??of many cells. Enjoy!
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