Ever needed to add random or meaningless text to Microsoft Word to test a document, temporarily fill a space, or see what the formatting looks like? Fortunately, Word provides several quick and easy ways to enter random text into your document.
Random text
To do this, place your cursor at the beginning of an empty paragraph. Type the following and hit Enter. It doesn’t matter which case you use: lowercase, uppercase, or mixed.
= rand ()
Depending on your version of Word, you will end up with a default set of paragraphs with the same number of sentences in each paragraph. In Word 2016, I had 5 paragraphs of three sentences each. All suggestions are helpful hints on how to use Word.
In older versions of Word, it gave you paragraphs of the classic sampler sentence, “A quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.” If you want this in newer versions of Word, just use the rand.old function.
– / = rand.old ()
You can change the number of sentences in a paragraph as well as the number of paragraphs using the format = rand (p, s). Replace p with the number of paragraphs you want and s with the number of sentences you want in each paragraph. For example, if you want 3 paragraphs of 6 sentences each, you would enter the following in a blank paragraph:
= rand (3,6)
Optionally, you can omit the number of sentences (s) parameter and Word will use the default number of sentences in a paragraph, which in Word 2016 is 3.
If you want to generate Lorem Ipsum text instead of the above random text, you can simply use the lorem function like below:
= lorem (5,5)
The same rules apply as for the rand function. If you prefer lorem ipsum text, this is the best way to paste it into Word. If you use the online lorem ipsum generator and copy and paste it into Word, it will highlight all the text as misspelled and everything will be red. When you create text using a function, it does not check spelling or check it.
Enable replace text as you type
If pasting free text in Word doesn’t work, click the Office Button, and then click the Word Options button at the bottom of the menu. In newer versions of Word, click File and Options.
In the Word Options dialog box, click Spelling and Spelling in the left pane.
Click the AutoCorrect Options button.
Word displays the AutoCorrect tab of the AutoCorrect dialog box. Make sure the Replace text as you type check box is selected.
If you are using an older version of Word, the AutoCorrect options can be found in the Tools menu.
If you actually look at the AutoCorrect replacement text entries in the AutoCorrect dialog box, you won’t find anything about this random text feature there. It seems to be a hidden feature of Word. Enjoy!
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