Dictate in any app · Spreadsheets
Dictating into Excel is not about formulas — it is about the text cells and comments nobody fills in. Typally types what you say straight into Excel — hold a key, talk, let go — so you can dictate anywhere Excel lets you type.
Disclosure: Typally is our product. We have tried to describe what Excel already does without talking you out of using it.Microsoft 365 includes dictation in some Excel builds, though it is less prominent than in Word and depends on your licence.
Spreadsheets are mostly numbers, and numbers are fast to type on a numpad. The slow part is the description column, the notes field and the review comment — which is exactly why those columns end up empty or filled with 'n/a'.
In practice people use it for: Notes and description columns, review comments on someone else's model, documenting what an assumption means, and the summary tab that explains the sheet to whoever opens it next.
You do not configure anything in Excel. The hotkey works wherever your cursor happens to be:
One install, one sign-in. Nothing else to configure.
Text goes wherever Excel has focus. One click first saves undoing a paragraph in the wrong box.
Hold, talk, release. Long passages are fine.
Excel commits a cell on Enter and moves down. If dictation ends with a return, your text lands and the cursor jumps before you can check it.
Typally types into the formula bar, which gives you a real text field to read back before committing, rather than fighting a cramped cell that commits on Enter. That makes the notes and description columns — the ones that explain what an assumption means — practical to fill in at last.
An analyst hands a model to a colleague and, for once, fills in the assumptions column: why the growth rate is what it is, where the number came from, what would make it wrong. Spoken into the formula bar it takes two minutes for the whole sheet. Typed, that column stays empty, as it always does.
Dictate long text into a cell using the formula bar rather than the cell itself. The formula bar gives you a real text field to read back before you commit it.
Excel commits a cell on Enter and moves down. If dictation ends with a return, your text lands and the cursor jumps before you can check it.
You can try, but symbol-dense input is where dictation performs worst. Formulas are faster typed; the text cells around them are faster spoken.
Some Microsoft 365 builds do, depending on licence and version. It is less consistently present than Word's.
Yes. Open the comment box so it has focus, then dictate — for a system-level tool it is an ordinary text field.
Free plan: 100 minutes of dictation a month, no card. Pro is $7.99/month if you want more.
Also dictate in: Google Sheets · Microsoft Word · Outlook · see all apps