For YEARS DECADES, I have been creating dummy documents for use in computer training. Usually, I ask someone to type a sentence – any sentence – and then I teach them to use keyboard shortcuts to select, copy and paste their sentence, resulting in a multi-paragraph, multi-page document to work with as I train.
It’s always interesting to see what people type:
the distracted or disinterested: “I can’t wait for lunch.”
and the suck-ups: “The computer trainer is really good!” (umm hmm)
and of course, the ever popular: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” frequently makes an appearance.
I’ve written about that third sentence before in a previous post entitled “automatically generate placeholder text in Microsoft Word“. You could automatically generate paragraphs composed of it using Word 2003 and earlier versions using a little known “=rand()” feature in Microsoft Word.
But now, with Word 2007 and 2010, it’s even better.
Check this out. Open either Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010 and, at the top of a new, blank document, type this:
=rand(8,5)
Then press the enter key.
What just happened? Continue reading “automatic random text generation. improved?”
pragmaticcomputingtips.com 