Turn a spreadsheet into an audio briefing
Upload an .xlsx to Lissin and ask for what changed rather than what it says. How to get a listenable briefing out of a sheet, and when not to bother.
The short answer
Upload the .xlsx and ask for an interpretation, not a reading. Lissin reads the cell values and sheet names; a script that narrates rows is unusable, but one that answers ‘what moved, by how much, and what is the likely reason’ is a genuinely useful two minutes.
How to do it
Put the question in the prompt
‘Which lines moved more than ten percent against last month, and what do they have in common’ is a briefing. ‘Summarise this spreadsheet’ is a list read aloud. This is the single decision that determines whether the episode is worth making.
Give the sheets meaningful names
Sheet names arrive with the data and are one of the few structural signals available. ‘Q3 pipeline by region’ tells the script what it is looking at; ‘Sheet1’ tells it nothing.
Upload the workbook, not a screenshot
XLSX is read natively. A screenshot of a sheet goes through OCR, which will read numbers correctly far less reliably than the file itself does.
At a glance
- Format
- XLSX read natively
- Best use
- Change summaries, anomalies, month-over-month narration
- Poor use
- Reading tables row by row
- Transcript
- Included, synchronised to the audio
Hear what comes out
Shows already published on Lissin, free to play in the browser.
Questions
- Can it do the arithmetic?
- It reads the values, including what formulas have already evaluated to. Treat any figure the script derives itself as something to check against the sheet before you repeat it in a meeting.
- Will it read charts in the workbook?
- No. Chart objects are not part of the text Lissin extracts.
- Is this a good idea at all?
- For a recurring numbers review that somebody currently writes up by hand every Monday, yes. For exploring a dataset, no — that is a screen job, and audio is the wrong medium for it.
What this does not do
Wide sheets narrate badly and long ones narrate worse. Pivot tables, conditional formatting and anything whose meaning is a colour are invisible. This is the format where the honest answer is most often ‘look at the sheet instead’.
Try it on something you already have
Upload a PDF, a deck or a document and describe the show you want from it. Or press play on anything in the library first — no account, no app.
Last reviewed 9 September 2026 by Lissin Editorial.