Make Excel More Whimsical With Sounds

I rarely use Office, it's something I have to deal with time-to-time as a part of working with clients, and out of the suite Excel is the tool that gets used the most. If you've got a licence for it, it really is a solid piece of software for working with relatively small (say 1/4M) data sets. Sure I do some CSV manipulation using standard *nix tools such as sort, head, cat etc., but in some scenarios when dealing with multiple data sources the viusual nature of it can be very handy indeed.

Recently, for reasons I've entirely forgotten, I was digging around in the program's settings and tripped over an option for sounds under the Accessilbity settings, and out of curiosity, enabled it. I am so glad that I did. I didn't have any love of Macs pre OS X, but I did like the sounds they made. Opening windows, moving windows, closing windows, everything made a sound, and it added a great sense of whimsy to normally dull process of navigating a UI. The sounds in Excel do very much the same thing. Every time I open it I'm surprised by the sounds (because everything else is so deathly silent, aside from never-ending notifications of course), and every time they make me smile.

While writing this post I checked out the 'Classic' theme, but as it turns out I not only prefer the 'Modern' theme, but it more readily reminds me of those old Macs, so I'll be sticking with that.

So if you do use Excel, and you like a bit of fun in your computing, I heartily encourage you try the sounds out.