Ms Office Tune Up

In business settings, it’s common to have one person (or group) designing a document and another person (or group) composing the document text. This is often an efficient way to work, but it often raises a problem: How can the designers work on the document if they don’t have the text? The usual solution is to fill the document with dummy text, which is placeholder text that temporarily substitutes for the real document text, thus enabling the design process to proceed. Ideally, the dummy text should at least resemble real-world text: a variety of word lengths, sentence lengths, and so on. Word gives you two methods for generating this text: the RAND function and the Repeat command.

Using the RAND Function

Word’s RAND function enables you to insert dummy text automatically: =RAND(paragraphs, sentences)

Here, the paragraphs value specifies the number of paragraphs of dummy text that Word will generate, and sentences specifies the number of sentences per paragraph. You can specify up to 200 paragraphs of up to 99 sentences each, or up to 99 paragraphs with up to 200 sentences in each.

For example, to generate five paragraphs with six sentences in each, you type the following formula at the spot in the document where you want the dummy text to display and then press Enter:

=RAND(5,6)

In all cases, Word generates the text from the following nine sentences:

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, use the Page Layout tab’s Themes gallery. 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.

If you specify fewer than nine sentences using RAND, then Word inserts a subset of this text. If you specify more than nine sentences, Word repeats the text as necessary.

Using the Repeat Command

If you have a bit of the document text ready, you can take advantage of Word’s Repeat fea­ture, which is found on the Quick Access toolbar. As you might expect, the Repeat com­mand repeats your most recent action in Word. For example, if you format text as bold, select different text, and then click Repeat (or use one of the faster keyboard shortcuts-F4 or Ctrl+Y), Word applies bold formatting to the new text.

Similarly, if you type some text and then run the Repeat command, Word “repeats” the typing by inserting the typed text again at the current cursor position. This means that you can quickly insert dummy text by selecting Repeat several times. Alternatively, copy some text, paste it, and then run Repeat as often as you need.

Even better, use that old document designer standby, the semi-Latin text snippet:

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 exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie conse­quat, vel illum 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. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eleifend option congue nihil imperdiet doming id quod mazim placerat facer possim assum.

I’ve pasted this text into the Chapter01.doc example file.

Technorati Tags: dummy text, word 2007

Popularity: 3% [?]