You will need Windows XP and Word 2002 or 2003 for this to work.
1. In Windows, click on Start | Control Panel | Speech | Text to
Speech | choose voice and volume settings | OK. See
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=306902 "How To Configure and Use
Text-to-Speech in Windows XP" for more information.
2. Install all of the Alternative User Input features from the
Word/Office CD. These features are not automatically installed in a
typical installation.
3. In Word, click on Tools | Speech. It is not necessary to
completely configure Speech Recognition at this point, so you can click
on Cancel if you want to skip this part for now. The Language toolbar
should appear somewhere on the screen. Click on the little
downward-pointing triangle at the bottom right corner of the Language
toolbar, and make sure the "Speak Text" option is checked.
4. Open a Word document, click where you want Word to begin reading
aloud or select the text that you want Word to read aloud, and click on
the Speak button on the Language toolbar.


jayratch wrote:

I noticed a text to speech feature in Excel 2003, so I tried to use it in
word. I clicked Speech in the Tools menu and got a dialogue about speech
recognition. That does me no good, I can type better than I can speak at the
moment.

Will word actually output speech, or do I actually need to copy-paste text
into Excel for that? There must be a setting I missed because I can't
imagine putting a reading feature in the numbers program but not the words
program. But the help system told me nothing, I think it's very excited
about the speech to text and that's great but I don't need it.

Any idea where the setting is to make it talk?

I've been using word since 1993, and I've had computers that talk since
1986, but never those two on the same machine.