Creating a beep sound in Excel – how to make a beep appear on command!

This week’s hint and tip is on creating a beep sound in Excel. Recently John was at a customers site carrying out some development in Excel and a question came up about the beep sound. Macros are covered in our Master Class Excel Bronze training course but this specific example of them isn’t covered. As this example isn’t covered in any of our courses, we decided to do a hint and tip on it. We are going to go through it now below.

The beep sound

This sound is often one that many have heard when working in Excel. When you make a mistake in typing out a function or when you’ve typed a number out of range in to a cell with number data validation applied to it. When either of these have occurred a beep sound has appeared to let you know that something is not right.

Did you know you can make an error activate a beep to signify that the error has occurred? In a recent visit to a customers site this question was asked and so John went away to investigate.

Making the beep sound appear

This is able to be done through the use of macros and VBA coding. List data validation, conditional formatting with colour for errors and IF statements were being used in the customers spreadsheet mentioned above. Leading on from this a macro was inserted into the IF statement. This macro caused a beep sound to occur when a specific word was selected from the drop down list.

The video below shows you how you can insert the macro into an IF statement to make a sound occur when a word is selected from a list. This demonstrates how simple it is and it may spark off ideas on how to do this on your own worksheets.

Take a look below at the video to find out more and then try them out on your own computer!