Today, I was all set to produce a Dictation tutorial video showing people how to use Dragon Naturally Speaking 9  with  Excel.  Murphy’s law came into play and Dragon Naturally Speaking refused to work with Excel.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the dictation or voice recognition to work at all.

I did some searching, going through help and my Dragon Naturally Speaking manuals and books.  Ultimately, I found the answer on a thread talking about the problem at SpeechComputing.com.  A former DNS programmer offered up what seemed to be a good description of the problem and the technical fix.

As regards why you could not dictate into an Excel spreadsheet, the Dragon log indicates that DNS attempted to load the Excel ActiveX control, but Windows fail to load it. Loading ActiveX controls is called a “Remote Procedure Call.” You have seen this in other posts as “RPC_Server Unavailable.” What happens is that the RPC server either has not been started or is inaccessible because Windoze burped and failed to launch it or cannot access it. This server controls the loading of ActiveX controls. If you’re running Windows XP Professional or Windows Vista, you can go always go to the Administrative Tools and look under local services for the RPC server. There are 2 entries. All you have to do is stop them and restart them. However, if you do this be sure to restart them in automatic mode vs. manual mode. Otherwise, they may fail to start the next time around. Regardless, if the RPC server stops functioning or is inaccessible for any reason, you will not be able to load ActiveX controls that load on-the-fly as they do in DNS. On the other side of the coin, don’t go looking for the path that is specified in the error (Exception thrown entries). This is a temporary folder and you will not find it because it is emptied (cleared) once the error reporting is completed. The results are stored in the temporary files folder, but they are stored in a manner that is not viewable. 

How do you enter text into Excel 2003 on XP SP2 using DNS Pro 9?

Too Technical of a Fix for Me - Here’s the Low Tech Fix!

Well, I tried that using my own system which runs on XP Media Center and I couldn’t get this to work.  I did find an alternative workaround.

Reboot your PC!

Yeah, it sucks that you have to revert to this step, but if all else fails this did work for me.

The problem seems to be intrinsic to Windows and Excel, but the reality is that this is the program that many people work in and DNS either will work or it will not.  Fortunately if it does not or stops working, then a reboot, should que things up to work once again. 

Dragon Naturally Speaking Articles on Maven Mapper’s Information

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There is an idiot light in Excel that often times needs to be shut off if you want to keep your sanity and keep your spreadsheets looking sharp.

The evil little critter looks like a paint brush and shows up hovering slightly over the edge of a cell’s corner.  It is supposed to tell you that the cell in question does not have the same formula as a cell next to it.

That is great if you have a massive spreadsheet of heavily repeating formulas.

However, when you have a spread sheet where the cells formulas are very different from cell to cell it gets in the way and becomes tedious to deal with, especially if you need to click into a cell obscured by this paint brush.

Plus, when it comes time to offer up your spreadsheet in a presentation or report, having a bunch of paint brushes in the document can infer to the people receiving your report that you have errors where none really exist.  This is bad for conveying confidence in your numbers and results and I advise that you turn this little whiz bang off in your spread sheet before you send it out. 

Of course, the people that receive the spreadsheet may have it on and there isn’t much you can do about that unless you put the spreadsheet into a pdf or something.

Here is how you can shut the paintbrush error / idiot light off in Excel!

Go to Tools in the menu, Select Options, then uncheck the box that says

Inconsistent formula in region

Then hit ok and click on a cell somewhere in the spreadsheet and it should be gone, until you reactivate it.

Hope that helps a little bit, its not curing mesothelioma or other types of cancer but might reduce your stress level a bit.

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Update

Here is the new article that provides the solution for this MindManager Pro 7 Excel error.

I’m looking for a solution to a MindManager Pro 7 error.  When I attempt to select an excel range, get the following error.

I’ve looked in the mindjet knowledge base for an answer, but there appears to be almost no information in the knowledge base on the topic of MindManager Pro 7.  That seems a little bizarre to me as this product is the seventh version and it was released last spring after a long beta.

So then I turned to the best MindManager resource outside of Mindjet, the MindManager Yahoo User Group.

Unfortunately, a keyword search on excel did not turn up anything there. So I left a question.

Has anyone run into this issue before and do you know the solution?

Info:

• I’m running Windows XP Media Center
• MindManager Pro 7 version 7.0.429 (latest version at time of this article 11-17)
• I’m running excel 2003 with sp2
• I’ve rebooted and still get the same error

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