Let's take a look at a fun hidden feature in Excel.
So let's assume,
originally I had this data on a piece of paper and I had to type it in my spreadsheet.
Now I want to double check that what I typed in is identical to what I had written down.
I can of course hold the paper beside my screen and cross-check. Or I can get Excel to read it out
for me.
The feature is called Speak cells.
Trust me not many people know it exists.
It doesn't exist on the ribbon. To be able to use it,
You have to add it to your quick access toolbar.
So let's go and select more commands. From this dropdown here
select either Commands not in the ribbon or All commands.
I'm gonna go with not in the ribbon and scroll all the way down to S. Speak cells is what I need.
Let's click on it and add it to the other side.
Let's actually add all the Speak cells items and see how we can use them. And then click on OK.
So we see them pop up here
and notice that some of these are a toggle.
This one is called Speak cells by rows.
There was one that was speak cells on enter.
That's this one.
"Cells will now be spoken on enter" activate it
and let's see what it is.
I'm just gonna start typing something in, "one thousand" "one thousand two hundred".
I can get Excel to speak.
Now let's take a look at the other options that we had.
So let Excel read this to us.
It's easier to read by rows in this case.
I'm going to activate speak cells on rows.
"Turn off speak on enter".
So let's just turn this off.
Instead I'm going to activate the speak cells, "Scarf-M", "one hundred", "one hundred and ten", "Scarp-W"
"one hundred and fifty".
Let's click on stop speak cells.
So when we have it by rows and we activate the start speak cells it goes through our data set.
And this makes it easier to compare this data to what we have on the piece of paper. To get Excel to stop
from speaking the cells.
Make sure that you click on stop speaking cells. Especially after you've activated speak cells
on enter.
It's always going to constantly speak unless you turn it off.
You can also change the voice and the speed of the voice. To do that
you have to go through your windows settings. So if you go to control panel there's a place called speech
recognition, text to speech and adjust the settings there and apply them. If you don't want to have these
in your quick access toolbar.
You can just right mouse click and remove from your quick access toolbar.
So that was the hidden tip.
We've learned how to input data, how to edit data, how to add simple calculations, and also how to get
Excel to speak back to us.