Absolute Beginners Guide to Microsoft Office Excel 2003

Speech recognition is very impressive at taking dictation, but it's also very competent when it comes to understanding and executing spoken commands. Open a workbook you previously saved. Strap on your microphone, and then click the Voice Command button in the Language toolbar. Say "Save." Speech recognition passes your command along to Excel, which saves your workbook file to disk. Click a cell that contains a label, and then say "Bold." The entry becomes boldfaced. Say "Italic." The entry becomes italic. (To remove bold or italics, select the cell again and repeat the command.)

In addition to those basic commands, following is a list of keyboard commands you can use:

"Return" or "Enter" to accept the current cell entry and move the cell selector down to the next cell

"Tab" to accept the current cell entry and move the cell selector to the next cell (to the right)

"Shift tab" to accept the current cell entry and move the cell selector to the previous cell (to the left)

"Backspace" to delete the character to the left of the insertion point

"Delete" to delete the character to the right of the insertion point or delete the contents of the selected cell(s)

"Space" or "Spacebar" to insert a space

"Escape" or "Cancel" to close a menu or dialog box

"Right-click," "Right-click menu," "Show Right-click menu," "Context menu," or "Show context menu" to show a context menu

"Home" or "Go home" to move the cell selector to the first cell in the current row

"Up" or "Go up" to move the cell selector up one cell

"Down" or "Go down" to move the cell selector down one cell

"Left" or "Go left" to move the cell selector one cell to the left

"Right" or "Go right" to move the cell selector one cell to the right

Of course, you must be able to punctuate your text as you dictate . Punctuation is fairly intuitive. For a period, say "Period" or "Dot." For a comma, say "Comma." For a semicolon, say "Semicolon."

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