This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Inserting Dummy Text
Dummy text is generic text that is inserted so you can see the document's formatting. This is especially useful when creating multicolumn frame-based layouts such as in a brochure or newsletter.
Different applications use different words for dummy text; some programs repeat the same sentence over and over, use nonsense words, or use Greek phrases. (The latter is an inside joke born of the fact that in typesetting, when lines are placed where text will eventually go, it's called greeking, as in "It's all Greek to me.")
Word 2007, however, has real English language paragraphs that it uses, and they even make sense! Word use three paragraphs with text that discusses the galleries feature. If you insert more than three paragraphs, they start repeating.
To insert dummy text, you use a random function such as the following, where p represents the desired number of paragraphs:
=rand(p)
You just type this directly into the document, and when you press Enter, Word replaces what you typed with the paragraphs.
By default, each paragraph has three sentences in it. If you want more or fewer sentences per paragraph, add another argument to the function, like this:
=rand(p,s)
Here, s is the desired number of sentences. For example, to get eight paragraphs with four sentences each, use =rand(8,4).