Random Tuesday Tech Tip #1 - Auto-generate text in MS Word

The other day I learned a neat Word trick that has nothing to do with libraries, but since part of the reason I keep this blog is to annotate things that are interesting to ME I thought I'd throw it up here in hopes that it's also of interest to you.  I've got a few other ones so thought I'd stretch it out as some sort of semi-regular series. 

Say for some reason you need to generate a large amount of random (or at least random-looking) text.  Maybe you need to fill up a website or Word document to see how the formatting looks over several paragraphs or pages.  Here's how to do it in word.  Simply type in the following formula and hit enter:

=rand(x,y) where x=the number of paragraphs you want, and y=the number of sentences. You can read more about it at the MS Knowledgebase.

Click through to see it in action if viewing in an aggregator:

Work in Word 2004 on the Mac too :-)


Technorati Tags: Word, tricks

Comments

[Heather]

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the Lorem Ipsum Generator (http://www.lipsum.com/)

[Paul R. Pival]

Yup, that works too - if you're online...

[Tina]

Thanks Paul. This could come in handy for some of my collage work, as I frequently use text backgrounds.

[Claire]

Heather, if you prefer Lorem Ipsum, try this in Word 2007(numbers correspond as above):

=lorem(7,8)

works the same way but will give you lorem ipsum text.