Just Give Me Some Text
Have you ever needed some text in an MS Word document to demonstrate something? You know, text where the content just doesn’t matter. Text for the sake of having text to show someone how to do something (text formatting, line spacing, indenting, bulleting, etc). Or, perhaps you just want to play with different fonts. You get the idea.
I know I’ve needed this before and I’ve spent a lot of time just trying to put nonsense into a document so that I could get on with the show.
But, did you know there’s a faster way to insert random text?
Next time you need some text to work with, try this on for size.
Open a document and type: =rand(2,6).
What you’ll get, after you hit the Enter key, is a series of paragraphs with the same sentence repeated over and over.
The first number in the parentheses is how many paragraphs will be created and the second number controls the number of sentences in each paragraph. The bigger the numbers, the more text Word will create. (The formula above creates two paragraphs with six sentences in each).
If you only need one paragraph, simply put one number into the parentheses (that number being the number of sentences that will be created).
There you have it. Now that you’ve got the text, you can get on with your show!
Also, for the curious, the sentence you’ll get is, of course, the infamous: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!”
~ April