Discover the Time-Saving 'Speak Cells on Enter' Feature in Excel (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: In this short Excel tutorial, I want to show you a wonderful but little-known feature in Microsoft Excel. And it's one that I think many of you will find very, very helpful. And it's called Speak Cells on Enter. And I want to start by talking about why you might want to use Speak Cells on Enter. This feature is perfect for people who enter a lot of data. Let's say that your boss or your manager or someone gives you a bunch of data that you're supposed to enter into Excel. You're probably going to be looking at a piece of paper or some other source of that data. Maybe it's another screen or another application. But you're going to be looking at the source and then typing that data into your Excel spreadsheet. So unless you're very confident in your typing skills, you're going to be looking back and forth from the source of the information, let's say the piece of paper, and switching from that. And then you're going to move your attention to your Excel spreadsheet to make sure that you typed the number or the data correctly. And then your eyes are going to go back to the paper and then back to Excel, back to the paper, back to Excel. This is going to be very time-consuming and it might drive you crazy. So let's look at how we can use Speak Cells on Enter to help us with that situation. Basically, I can just go up here to what's called the Quick Access Toolbar. And you can see right now I've added a couple of extra tools. If you want to learn more about this, please watch my video that covers the Quick Access Toolbar. But I'm going to click this button here to customize the Quick Access Toolbar. I'm going to go down to More Commands and it's going to give me a list of some of the popular commands that you can easily add to the Quick Access Toolbar so that they appear here. But I'm going to click where it says Popular Commands and I'm going to switch to either All Commands or just Commands Not in the Ribbon. And if I click on that, I should be able to browse down and find Speak Cells on Enter. There it is. I'm going to click on it, click Add, and it adds it to this list of tools that I want to be here on the Quick Access Toolbar. Now, if I don't like the order, I could click on it and then click this button to move it up or down to put it in the right spot. Now, I simply click OK and there it is. I have a button for Speak Cells on Enter and it's right there on my Quick Access Toolbar. So, let's say with this spreadsheet here, which is a list of games that I would sell in a hypothetical board game and card game store. And let's say we add some more games to the inventory. Let's say a classic game like Stratego. That's a lot of fun. I type in Stratego, I hit Enter, and nothing happened. Why? The reason nothing happened is because up here on the Quick Access Toolbar, even though I added Speak Cells on Enter to the toolbar, it's not activated yet. So, I have to click on it and it's ready to go. So, let's try that again. Stratego, I type it in, hit Enter, and it tried to pronounce it, did OK. And now I'll go down and I want to add Settlers of Catan. Tap Enter. Yeah, pretty good. But that at least tells me that it recognized what I typed and that now I can move on to the next data to enter. The last one I'm going to add is Uno Madness. Now, this is especially useful in many cases with numbers. So, I can put in the sales for Stratego, for Settlers of Catan, and Uno Madness. So, I hope you can see the potential benefit here with Speak Cells on Enter. It really can help you to check your work as you enter it into the spreadsheet. If you ever get sick of Speak Cells on Enter, then go up here to the Quick Access Toolbar, just click the button, and this is a toggle button, so you can toggle it on, and you can toggle it off. I hope you've enjoyed watching this tutorial. If you did, please click the Like button below, and consider connecting with me on my social media websites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. And definitely do subscribe to my YouTube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students, and watch for another video from me at least every Monday. If you'd like to learn more about any of these fun games, please look in the description below. And if you'd like to support my YouTube channel, please consider becoming a patron of mine on Patreon. And you'll find links to my Patreon account in the description below.