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How To Generate Random

Text In Word
Terry Freedman

Jan 22, 2018·3 min read

Picture from Pixabay.com Licence: CCO

You know how sometimes you see Latin-looking placeholder text

in documents? Well, you can generate that yourself in Word. But
before I explain how, why might you wish to do so in the first
place?

The most common and obvious reason is to see what a particular

template or font looks like when it is applied to a body of text.
Rather than copying and pasting text from another source, or
typing it anew, you can save time by using a built-in macro.
Another reason to want to generate a great deal of text quickly is to
get an idea of how a published report or book might look when
there are 200 pages of it to bind and handle.

Here’s how you do it:

Type =lorem() and then press the Enter key. That will generate the
familiar “lorem ipsum” text.

You can go further, and specify the number of paragraphs to

generate, and the number of sentences in each paragraph. Thus
the command =lorem(10,4) will generate a body of text
comprising 10 paragraphs, each of which contains 4 sentences.

It will, of course, be obvious that in order to generate a vast

number of pages you simply need to enter large numbers within
the brackets. Much will hinge on the size of your font and the
dimensions of the page layout, but experiment. For instance, try
entering 200,10 and see how many pages that leads to. If the
result is too many or too few, just press Ctrl A and then Delete,
and start again!

The Rand Command

If Latin isn’t your thing, then you can still generate ordinary
English text. Here’s a video on how to do this, or you can just carry
on reading.
Type the following, and then press the Enter key:

=rand()

As you can see, several paragraphs of Help text have been

generated.

You can control how many paragraphs there are, and how many
sentences you have in each paragraph. If you’d prefer to watch
how to do this instead of reading about it, look at the very short
screencast below.

More Control
Rather than typing =rand(), you can type =rand(x,y), where x is
the number of paragraphs and y is the number of sentences in
each one. Try it now, with low numbers that enable you to see
what’s going on, such as =rand(1,6), which will produce one
paragraph with six sentences, or =rand(6,1), which will give you
six paragraphs with a single sentence in each.

If you need to check things like pagination, just type a number

high enough to give you lots of paragraphs and sentences, and
therefore several pages. For example, typing something like
=rand(30,6) should do the trick.

The Old Rand Command

Until Office 2007, the rand command generated several
paragraphs of that tried and traditional random text, The quick
brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.I have to say that I preferred
that, because it contains every letter in the English alphabet. If
that’s your preference too, then type =rand.old() instead of
=rand(). Again, to control the number of paragraphs and
sentences, use the format =rand.old(x,y).

This article originally appeared in the Digital Education

newsletter. Terry Freedman is a freelance writer. He publishes
the ICT & Computing in Educationw website and the Writer’s
Know-how website.

Helping each other write better.

Terry Freedman

Me: passionate about learning and technology, and writing! My blogs & newsletters are
at https://www.ictineducation.org and www.writersknowhow.org
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