Congratulations on making it this far, we are at the rock star stage of Microsoft Word for writers. And now I want to introduce two of my favorite new features to this program that have appeared in recent months and the other in recent years. So first I want to show you dictate, because this might be the game changer for you. If you've been thinking about exploring dictation software to help you write but you haven't made the plunge yet or bought Dragon Dictation software or anything like this, this is available for free. And you can visit Microsoft's website or just do a simple search internet search looking for Microsoft Word dictate and that will come up. It's a simple download that you can do and it will appear probably at the end of your home ribbon toolbar.

So for example, let's say I want to dictate an opening portion of the document. I'm just going to come down to a new line there. And turn on my dictate feature, you'll note that there is a button portion as well as a drop down portion. So I'll just show you what's on the choices here. If you speak a primarily foreign language to other than English, you can select one of the language types from the drop down menu here. It will help with the autocorrect and spelling of the word choices that dictate hears you giving, or they have a few other additional languages available in beta.

These are preview languages at the moment that they're still finessing. So for now, I'm going to choose English us and I'm going to turn on dictate and just to make it easy, I am going to read the text that's in my first paragraph and we'll see together how well dictate picks this up for me, in order to allow me to perhaps compose my document faster than I might if I had to type it. Here we go. When I was slim and single I was also miserable period, depression, comma, my closest friend comma urged me to seek out projects in which I could immerse myself period. They lived in denial, comma, at least I felt unmistakeably needed period. Okay, and I clicked the dictate button at the end to turn that off.

You probably noticed while I was speaking, that anytime I said comma when I want to do insert punctuation, that it's spelled out the word comma. And you might have been scared for me that it was going to cause a lot of anxiety when I had to go back and replace those, but as the dictate continued, and it's artificial intelligence kicked in, it understood at some of the grammar levels, what I was really meaning and shy of one spelling difference here. With unmistakeably, I would not spell it with that in there. So I imagine in a future edition of dictate, it will apply spellcheck automatically. short of that this is a super super rendition Word Perfect almost Wow. I'm I'm super impressed because I grew up in the sticks and sometimes my accent picks in.

So you may find that using this software, you have to speak a little more clearly and precisely than you might normally. But you my salt might also find that you can get away with your average speech, give it a test and let me know what you think. The second tool of the same ilk that I want to show you is on your review tab. Because it's a method you might use when you're close to the editing or revision portion of your manuscript. And it's here on the left. This new feature is called read aloud.

I believe that It's been available in the two most recent versions of Microsoft Word no three now actually, I think it was available starting in 2016 version, but park your cursor or select text that you would like it to read, and then click the read aloud button. Here we go. When I was slim and single I was also miserable. Depression, my closest friend urged me to seek out projects in which I could immerse myself. You'll find a toggle toolbar here that appears on the top right, so you can pause, rewind or play or alter the sound settings so you can slow the reading speed down or speed it up depending on how close attention you're able to pay for that. And you have a couple of voice choices.

You have David mark and zero let's hear Sarah's voice bathed in denial. At least I felt unmistakeably needed Sounds like that device who shall not be named if you want to ask her how the weather is doing. sera sounds very familiar to me. Okay, I hope you've enjoyed these two new features of Microsoft Word. They're both available for free. The read aloud feature on your review tab, or the dictate which you will need to probably visit the Microsoft Office Page.

Just do a quick search for Microsoft dictate and you'll find the link there to download that. Enjoy