This is driving me CRAZY
I have an 2011 MacBook Pro. It's running a long-sunsetted iOS. On that ancient Mac, I have excel 2008. The Mac has software on it that I can't replace, and the computer itself is starting to fail, so I have to be careful with it. Using it for work is not on my list of "how to finally kill my old computer." For more than a year, I have been dictating numbers into excel spreadsheets using "enable dictation" and a generic bluetooth headset. It rarely picked up background noise (keys clicking, papers moving, TV playing, music playing) and was very reliable to do exactly what I needed to do.
I recently got a brand spanking new Dell laptop with Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 from my employer. I have tried to setup the exact same functionality as up above. Same headset, same excel task of speech-to-text typing NOTHING but numbers in a column. I'm using the built in Speech Recognition tool.
It's pathetically bad.
Every background noise is picked up and interpreted as a word. The keyboard clicking, papers moving, cars driving by outside heard through an open window, coughing, my cat meowing. If you can think of a noise, it turns into a word. Or it picks random cells to move to. Or activates function keys. Or who knows what. It even types when it hears the piano (which is actually really funny. Happy Birthday has been quite amusing, but I digress.) My "this would take 45 minutes on the Mac" task took more than two hours, not including hour and a half I spent trying everything I could find on the internet.
To be fair, when it does type the numbers, it has almost a 100% accuracy rate. So will give it credit on that.
I have unsuccessfully tried:
the full speech training program, while making noise in the background with the intent of it learning to filter it out
the full speech training program, with no noise in the background
adding and recording words to the "do not dictate" list as they come up in the cells from background noise
putting numbers 0-9 (digits, not spelled out) and the only two commands I want - insert and enter - in the speech dictionary
opening the "do not dictate" window and making noise so whatever it came up with wouldn't type. This of course removes the possibility of using dictation for anything else, but I can deal with that.
putting the commands in do not dictate I don't want to use, move is a big annoyance, in the do not dictate list, but they still happen
changed the microphone input to 50, but that just means I have to yell, and it is still hearing everything and making up new stuff to type
I can't think of anything else to do! It's mind boggling to me that the speech to text on a 15 year old program functions 100 times better than the current one. And I didn't have to do ANYTHING but connect the headset and click "enable dictation" for it to work at 99% accuracy.
What on earth am I doing wrong? What have I missed? (I'm betting it will be a painfully easy setting that I overlooked.) Or did Microsoft decide that they were going to "improve" things again????
I have to enter 100 or more 6-12 digit numbers every time I need to process a spreadsheet. The numbers come off of teeny tiny labels that are hard to read so I need to concentrate on reading the numbers, not worrying about fat fingering them when I'm doing the data entry. The process that goes before and after the number entry is already mind numbingly tedious, having to check and re-check each entry will result in me throwing the stupid laptop off of my roof. Which won't solve anything, but will momentarily make me feel better.
I'm not technically supposed to install un-approved third party software onto the computer, but at this point, I'm open to it if it will make this function correctly.
So, now that my rant is done. How do I make this functional??!?!?!?!
Please help!