In business settings, it’s common to have one person (or group) designing a document and another person (or group) composing the document text.

This is often an efficient way to work, but it often raises a problem: How can the designers work on the document if they don’t have the text? The usual solution is to fill the document with dummy text, which is placeholder text that temporarily substitutes for the real document text, thus enabling the design process to proceed.

Ideally, the dummy text should at least resemble real-world text: a variety of word lengths, sentence lengths, and so on. Word gives you two methods for generating this text: the RAND function and the Repeat command.

Using the RAND Function
Word’s RAND function enables you to insert dummy text automatically:

=RAND(paragraphs, sentences)

Here, the paragraphs value specifies the number of paragraphs of dummy text that Word will generate, and sentences specifies the number of sentences per paragraph. You can specify up to 200 paragraphs of up to 99 sentences each, or up to 99 paragraphs with up to 200 sentences in each.

For example, to generate five paragraphs with six sentences in each, you type the following formula at the spot in the document where you want the dummy text to display and then press Enter:

=RAND(5,6)

In all cases, Word generates the text from the following nine sentences:

On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers,footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks. When you create pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current document look. You can easily change the formatting of selected text in the document text by choosing a look for the selected text from the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab. You can also format text directly by using the other controls on the Home tab. Most controls offer a choice of using the look from the current theme or using a format that you
specify directly. To change the overall look of your document, use the Page Layout tab’s Themes gallery. To change the looks available in the Quick Style gallery, use the Change Current Quick Style Set command. Both the Themes gallery and the Quick Styles gallery provide reset commands so that you can always restore the look of your document to the original contained in your current template.

If you specify fewer than nine sentences using RAND, then Word inserts a subset of this text.If you specify more than nine sentences, Word repeats the text as necessary.

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