Quick Way to Generate Content

I can’t think of too many projects I’ve been involved with that didn’t interact with some type of content in one way or another. While it’s ideal to have the final content to use during development, that’s not always possible.  The content may not exist yet, or it may be confidential  - whatever the case may be I often  need to use sample content as a placeholder while developing.  While I could always copy and paste some text from a website to use as a placeholder there is a better way that gives me much more control and is just as quick and easy. 

In most Microsoft Office apps you can generate a block of sample content by typing =rand() and then pressing enter.   If you want more control over the content that is generated there are two parameters you can include.  The first parameter is the number of paragraphs to generate.  For example =rand(4) will spit out 4 paragraphs.   The second parameter is the number of sentences to include in each paragraph.  So =rand(2,5) will give you 2 paragraphs with 5 sentences in each.  

If you want to generate ‘lorem ipsum’ text you can use =lorem() instead.  With =lorem() you can also pass the two parameters control the number of paragraphs and sentences that are generated.