There are several reasons why you might need dummy text in your document. You may be waiting on an article from someone else or you may have to still write an article yourself. You could also be working on just the layout and design of your newsletter without having any content yet, or you may be designing a template and need a placeholder for text. Whatever your reason, using dummy filler text is an easy technique to help solve these problems.
Microsoft Word has a built in feature to provide random text. At any point in a document or table where you wish to place dummy text, simply type:
=rand()
The resulting dummy text will be multiple reiterations of the standard phrase, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Of course, this is a well known phrase that contains every letter of the English alphabet. By default, the text that is inserted will consist of three paragraphs, each with five sentences. To change the number of paragraphs and/or sentences generated, simply add numbers inside of the parenthesis symbols in the original command. The first number will be the number of paragraphs, and the second number will be the number of sentences in each paragraph. Use a comma between the two numbers. For example,
=rand(2,4)
This will result in two paragraphs, each with four sentences. If you leave the second number off, it will default to five sentences. For example, to get twelve five-sentence paragraphs, you would type:
=rand(12)
More Dummy Text
Although this is a quick and easy way to add filler text when you are in a Word document, there are better ways to add dummy text. The text that MS Word inserts is not a good representation of true writing, with differing sentence lengths. Thus using the filler text provided by MS Word will result in all of your lines breaking in the exact same place. To get a more accurate representation of how real text would fill in your space, use a "lorem ipsum" version of dummy text. We have provided a complete version of "lorem ipsum" for your use. You can make the text any size you need by simply copying and pasting it into your document, adding additional paste of the text to fit larger spaces and truncating it down into smaller sections for smaller spaces. It can be broken anywhere to fit.
If you'd like to automatically insert this text into your Word documents, you will need to set it up as an AutoText entry. Insert the Lorem Ipsum text into your document and select this text. On the Insert menu, point to AutoText, and then click new. (The keyboard shortcut for this is Alt+F3.) You can then name your AutoText entry (you may wish to use Lorem). If you have AutoComplete turned on, you will then be offered the option to insert the complete text once you've typed the first four letters of the name of your AutoText entry by simply pressing Enter.