In an earlier post where I was showing the Immersive Reader feature of Microsoft Word I wanted to demonstrate the technology without using a “live” document so needed a document with some random text and it occurred that others may not be aware of the neat trick within Word to do this automatically.
There are in fact two ways of generating text. They work in the same way but deliver different types of text.
The first uses the technique used in printing and graphics design and generates Lorem Ipsum, to trigger simply type:
=lorem()
and hit return.
The alternative route will generate a stream of English text and can be triggered as follows:
=rand()
and hit return.
Both options can also be used with parameters to specify how much text is generated. The syntax for this is as follows:
=lorem(paragraph, sentence)
or
=rand(paragraph, sentence)
so if you type =rand(5,5) you will get 5 paragraphs of 5 sentences each.
This can be particularly useful if you are trying to work out how pages flow before creating the content, particularly if you have images or tables in the document or are creating something like a booklet.
