Do you read the content of your email to yourself while you are actually typing the email?
How many times have you used Outlook to send out emails with correctly spelt but the wrong words in them?
I’m sure this is the same with everyone, as we type the content of our email, we usually read to ourselves what we are typing, but often we say the correct word to ourselves but type the wrong word.
In the earlier post this week, I showed you how you can avoid common spelling mistakes using Outlook’s Autotext.
Here is another great way to avoid spelling mistakes…
Get Outlook itself to READ OUT the email to you!!!
Let’s look at the example we discussed in the earlier post again:
“Our sincere apologize for any inconvenience caused”
The word “apologize” was spelled correctly but was incorrectly used. The correct word was “apologies”.
These mistakes are easy to pick up if you use Outlook’s built-in (but well hidden) feature that will read the email aloud to you.
Windows already has the ability to read text back to you. Here’s how you can add a button inside Outlook to read out selected text to you.
Note: The following tip works in Outlook 2010 and 2013 only.
- Create a new email.
- Right Click on a blank area of the Ribbon
- Click Customize Quick Access Tool Bar
- Choose Commands not in Ribbon in drop down
- Scroll and select Speak
- Click Add
- Click OK
Outlook will add a new button to your Quick Access Tool Bar as shown below.
How to use the button to get Outlook to read the email aloud to you
- Create a new email
- Type some text
- Select the text that you want read out to you.
- Click the new button that was added in the previous steps.
Outlook will read the email out to you.
Next Steps
You may also want to add the “Speak Selected Text” button to your Inbox so that you read emails that you are reading in your Reading Pane.
Go to your Inbox and follow the steps above to add the button.
Finally you can also open an email that you have received and follow the same steps so that you can hear any email that you have received or already sent.
This simple tip has improved the quality of our emails here at Standss… hope it does the same for you.
