by Jared Goralnick
Word geeks have long loved impressing our audience during demos by typing “=rand(x,y)” where x is the number of paragraphs and y is the number of sentences per paragraph. What it would do in version of Word through Word 2003 is repeat the sentence “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”
Not so in Word 2007. Now it uses this mundane and “helpful” set of Word instructions–boo. You’d think they’d just go with lorem ipsum if they wanted to use different sentences. Anyhow, the new result repeats the following paragraph over and over:
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, choose new Theme elements on the Page Layout tab. 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.
I understand that this offers better demo text than repeating a single sentence, but I wish it could’ve been a little more creative. This is just begging me to write a new random generator that takes lines from Stairway to Heaven or The 9/11 Report or something like that…
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There is also “=lorem(x,y)” where x means number of paragraphs and y number of words in paragraph.
Hey, that’s a wonderful tip, thanks Aivo!
You can also type “=rand.old(x,y)” in Word 2007 to display “quick brown fox…”
The comments are great! I googled (and found this) after i installed a trial version and discovered the =rand was gone! now i know!, although i am surprised that Jared Goralnick did not dig deeper and give the “Word Geeks” the good news!
hello , this is really Good trick… and i am appreciating for the comments….
I have MSWord 2007 and this does not work for me, although it used to in 2003. All I get now is just what I typed (=rand(4,5)), nothing more.. :(
dont type in the outside parentheseese
I don’t think Microsoft has it in them anymore to be creative. They’re more corporate and I’d take my bet with a fun application from Google any day.
Cheers
Neil