Working in Microsoft Word, I often need some junk text to play around with, for

various reasons:

* Im designing a document and dont want to get bogged down in what the text
actually says.

* Im creating a template with various paragraph styles and need to see what they
will look like.

* Im creating a macro and need some text for testing purposes.

* Im trying to learn more about some feature of Microsoft Word and dont want to
practice on a real document.

Microsoft Word 97, 98, 2000, and 2001 include an undocumented feature that
generates all of the sample text I need. Maybe youll find it helpful too. To use
it, type the following line into a Word document and press the ENTER key:

=Rand(1,1)

Word will insert the following text into your document:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

(As you probably know, this sentence includes every letter in the alphabet and is
sometimes used for typing practice.)

Need more than one sentence? You can specify how many sentences you need by
changing the last number in the Rand statement. For example, if you needed five
sentences, you could type this

=Rand(1,5)

which would produce this:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the
lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps
over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Need more than one paragraph? You can specify how many paragraphs you need by
changing the first number in the Rand statement. For example, if you needed two
paragraphs (with five sentences in each one), you could type this

=Rand(2,5)

which would produce this:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the
lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps
over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the
lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps
over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

In other words, the first number specifies the number of paragraphs you want to
insert; the second number specifies the number of sentences you want to include in
those paragraphs.
If youre using Word 95 or lower (or if youre tired of that quick brown fox), you
can use the traditional Latin Lorem ipsum dolor . . . , which has been used as
placeholder text for centuries:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh
euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad
minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ulliam corper suscipit lobortis nisl ut
aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem veleum iriure dolor in hendrerit in
vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel willum lunombro dolore eu feugiat
nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit
praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi.

If youre curious about this, its a garbled quotation from Ciceros De Finibus
Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Good and Bad), book 1, paragraph 32, which
reads, Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit, amet,
consectetur, adipisci velit, meaning, There is no one who loves pain itself, who
seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain. The book was
popular during the Renaissance, when the passage was used in a book of type samples
for that wonderful new technology, printing.

If your Latin is good enough (unlike mine), you can read Ciceros complete text (or
just get a whole bunch of great sample text) here:

http://patriot.net/~lillard/cp/cic.fin.html