Generating “placeholder” text automatically in Word

by WordGuru · 0 comments

in Word 2007,Word XP/2002,Word XP/2003

While this isn’t a common need in law offices, it’s such a cool trick, I just had to share.

Have you ever seen a sentence that started with “Lorem ipsum …”?  That’s placeholder text that web and print designers use to show how text will be formatted in a document.  And it’s easy to insert automatically in Word.

If you ever need a block of nonsense words to test formatting, etc., you can insert this classic placeholder text in Word 2007 by typing “=lorem(#)” (without the quotes, of course) where #=the number of paragraphs of text you need.

To do insert random text in Word 2003 and earlier, use =rand(p,l), where p=number of paragraphs and l=number of lines (repetitions).  This version will insert the classic sentence “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”  For example, if you insert =rand(5,3), Word inserts 5 paragraphs of 3 sentences each.

Cool, huh?  (Okay, I get a little too excited about undocumented goodies.)

Hat tips to Webtlk.com, OfZenandComputing, and Microsoft for this trick!

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