Here’s a trick that comes in useful if, say, you have a blank Word doc you want to populate quickly to check out formatting and layout. A simple command will dump a block of sample text into your Word doc. You just type it in to the main document and press Return, no opening special dialogs or VB windows or anything.
- Open your Word doc.
- Go to a new blank line.
- Type:
=rand() - Hit Return.
- Count to 3 and be delighted. 🙂
Notes:
- If you know how much text you want (a small bit, a big bit, loads of paragraphs, or one enormous block to test widow/orphan settings), you can pass 2 number parameters to rand:
=rand(a,b)
a is the number of paragraphs you want, b is the number of sentences in each paragraph. By default, with no params, you get 3 of each. - If you have a fondness for Lorem ipsum, you can use the =lorem() function to do much the same thing, but with passages of lorem ipsum instead of blocks of English text.