Board and Commission Meeting Assistance

Dictate a Document on Your Desktop

Using Microsoft Word is a great assistant to getting meeting minutes created, at least in draft form, by using the dictation option.

Download or play the audio file for the meeting you want to create a document for and follow these simple steps.

With your computer’s internal microphone, or with a USB microphone in hand, you can dictate your document in Word on both Windows and Mac. Head to the Home tab and click “Dictate.”

When the microphone icon appears, you can drag to move it anywhere you like. Click the icon to begin dictating, click again to stop or pause. You can also say “Pause dictation” or “Stop dictation” and can click the icon to resume.

To enable auto-punctuation, change the dialect, or filter sensitive language, click the gear icon to open the Settings.

If you need help with what you can say for things like punctuation, symbols, making corrections, or controlling dictation, click the question mark icon near the microphone to open the Help sidebar.

To stop using dictation, click the “X” in the corner of the icon’s window to close it.