Hey Programmers: potential for scripting Microsoft Excel?

By Voracious P. Brain, 14 September, 2017

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I need to use Excel for work collaboration and because Numbers doesn't support array entry of data. But Excel for Mac isn't designed the same way Numbers is, and VO does not recognize header rows and columns. I don't expect Apple to ever write special code to overcome Excel's non-Apple-like design, and I don't expect Microsoft to redesign Excel to overcome VO's limitations. So, I'm wondering if there's a way for someone in the community to script a solution either in Apple Script or in the Visual BASIC editor built into MS Office apps. For example, press a key and the system voice will say what's in the first row of the current column, or the first column of the current row. I don't know either AppleScript or Visual BASIC well enough at all to know if this is even possible. It would still not be an ideal solution, of course, but would make Excel usable in most instances.

By the way, there's a Microsoft page saying how to make Excel expose headers to screen readers through making tables, but it didn't work for me or anyone else who's ever mentioned it on the Webby Web.

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