I am a big fan of text-to-speech technology. Excel 2007 is packed with many features, including one called Speak Cells, which basically lets you feed your chosen cells to a text-to-speech engine. It is a great accessibility tool – when my eyes are too tired to read the cells on my computer screen, I just let Excel read aloud the values for me.
By default, it is not easily accessible in the Excel menu, so a little tweak in the Quick Access toolbar is necessary. First open the Quick Access Toolbar then choose More Commands:
Under the “Choose commands from” dropdown choose “All Commands” then choose the Speak Cells commands.
Make sure to choose all Speak Cells commands so they will be added in your menu:
Click OK to apply the changes. You should see the buttons appear on the menu:
To use the commands, select the cells that you want to be read then click the Speak Cells button.
The computer voice will speak the values of the cells you selected. To switch between speak by rows or speak by columns, just click on their corresponding buttons:
This buttons acts like a switch. Only one is active so when you click one of them, the other one gets deactivated.
This is one of the best accessibility features of MS Office 2007. This feature helps me validate data in cases when I’m too tired to accurately read the values of many cells.
Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.
Speak cells is a very helpful tool in Excel. How can I use it in indonesian ? (not in English). Please send the guide to my email. thanks.