Text to speech is an Excel feature that allows you to hear cell values. Text to speech lets you to select cells, and then hear the values in the cells as spoken by Excel’s text to speech synthesiser. You can use text to speech to read cell values as you enter them, allowing you to hear a typing mistake. This can be useful when you are transcribing values into Excel from a hard copy print out, or from written notes, and you can’t look directly at the Excel screen. You can also select a range of cells and have the cell values spoken to you one by one as you go about some other task away from your computer.

 

You can control how text to speech works by using the text to speech toolbar.

 

 

The buttons (from left to right) control the speech in the following ways:

·              The first button on the left (the Speak cells button, with the green triangle) speaks the value of a selected cell when you click on the button

·              The next button (the Stop button, with the x on a red circle) stops the speaking

·              The following button (the By rows button) will start speaking the cell entries in a range, by rows starting with the top row

·              The second button from the right of the toolbar ( the By columns button) tells Excel to speak the cell contents in a range down columns starting at the left most column

·              The last button,(Speak on Enter, with the blue arrow), tells Excel to speak the cell contents after you edit a cell, or add a value to a cell, and press Enter

 

To start to use text to speech, you will probably first have to install it. The first step is to choose Tools->Speech->Show Text to Speech Toolbar.

 

When you see the text to speech toolbar, click on one of the buttons. If you see the following message, you will have to install text to speech. Click the Yes button to install it.

 

 

When the installer is finished, you are ready to start using text to speech. Click on the Speak on enter button (the button with the blue arrow) on the text to speech toolbar. Next, type a word or number into a cell and press Enter. You should hear a rather mechanical sounding voice speak the value you that was just entered. Experiment with the text to speech feature on different cell values, and cell ranges of various sizes.

 

 You can turn the speaking off by clicking the stop button on the text to speech toolbar.