Let Office read documents to you

Too busy to read all of the documents on your To Do list? If you want, you can have your Office applications read them to you. This will work in any Office 2010 program except Access.

First, click the arrow icon to the right of your Quick Access Toolbar on the Office application for which you want to enable speaking, and then select More Commands:

Now select All Commands and scroll down to select Speak and then click the Add button:

Note that Excel has several Speak-related commands:

You can toggle whether to speak cells by columns or rows (it's just a setting that doesn't initiate the Speak command), and then start the actual reading by using Speak Cells or turn on Speak Cells on Enter so you can use the Enter key instead.

If you really want to save time, record the audio of a long document being spoken into a tool such as OneNote (which records WMA that can be saved to your hard drive) or the free Audacity (which can export to MP3) so you can listen to it during your commute. It may not be a book on tape, but it could help you get ahead at the office.

Suzanne