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To create a business document, you often need text to create the design and layout of documents. But sometimes, the data to be put into the document is not ready or you haven’t thought about it yet.  In these cases, to create a design you can use some inbuilt functionality of MS Office 07 to add random data to your document.

Here’s how to do that for MS Word 2007 and Excel 2007:

MS Word 07

In order to insert random text in Word 2007, type in =rand(X,Y) and press Enter, where X is number of paragraphs you want to insert and Y is number of lines in each paragraph. e.g typing =rand(3,10) and pressing Enter will insert 3 paragraphs of 10 lines each.

If you type in only =rand() then it will insert 3 paragraphs of 4 lines each by default. Word 2007 uses random text which is readable as compared to previous versions which inserted “The quick brown fox…” repeatedly.

MS Excel 07

In MS Excel, similar function =rand() is available, type =rand() into one of the cell and press Enter. The rand() function in Excel inserts a random floating point value between 0 and 1.

If you need a random value between particular range, try =randbetween(X,Y), which would insert a random value between X and Y. e.g =randbetween(10,300) will insert a random value between 10 and 300.

In excel, the rand() or randbetween() functions add value to only single cell. In order to add data to multiple cells quickly, drag the Fill handle of the cell you typed in rand() or randbetween() to the cells you want to add random data.

Using the random data, you may know create the design of your document easily and then replace the random data with original data.