Last week a coworker and I were going through the technical requirements for an RFI and one of the questions was related to the behavior of a specific type of input element as the amount of text increased. Typically when faced with needing some text and things like structure (words, sentences, paragraphs) are important I turn to one of the online Lorem Ipsum generators like http://www.lipsum.com/ but my coworker turned to me and asked if I knew about the ability to generate random text in Word. Huh? He quickly opened Word and typed =rand() and hit enter, Word responded with three paragraphs of well formatted and perfectly readable English (actually this will be localized based on current settings). Wow, that is cool! He went on to show me a few variations such as =rand(5) which will generate five paragraphs and =rand(5,2) which additionally sets the number of lines in each paragraph to two. But wait there’s more, =lorem() is also there to generate the traditional blocks of Lorem ipsum. I later did a bit more research to get some details on this and according to this Microsoft KB article the functionality has existed since Word 97 although the text generated was refined in Word 2007 to pull from the help files. So maybe I had seen it at some point in the past and had simply forgotten about it but I will definitely be taking advantage of this next time I need some text for testing or sample layouts.