Since it will be hard to take anything seriously today, on this Word Wrangling Wednesday that lands on April Fool’s, we bring you what some might think of as silliness with Word. This is both a “trick” and an actual function. Try it out!
Generate Random Text
If you’ve watched my demo videos, you have seen some nonsense text that I use in them. Word can generate this “random” text right inside a document — though it seems to pull text from the help files, so it’s more “dummy text” than it is random. Simply type the phrase below into a document, replacing x with the number of paragraphs you want and y with the number of sentences. Then hit Enter to generate the text.
=rand(x,y)
To generate classic Lorem ipsum text instead, use the same approach as above, instead writing Lorem where rand appears. For example:
=Lorem(2,4)
And to satisfy your typing teacher, you could even generate the classic phrase “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” over and over again, by typing this:
=rand.old(x,y)
Troubleshooting
Of course, the problem with placing this dummy text in a document is that some of it may survive through production and live on forever in the final product. User beware.
Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.
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