Sometimes when you’re experimenting or learning how to do something in Microsoft Word, it helps to have a “dummy” document that has several pages of text to work with.

 
This came up recently with one of my long-term clients. In fact, this lady was probably one of my very first clients when I started my computer business up in Maine.
She works with Microsoft Word all the time, and recently upgraded to Office 365. Her previous version was very outdated, so there were a number of changes in the way Word was laid out – quite different than what she was used to using for the last 10-15 years.
She had a very specific need. She needed to be able to have page numbers appear on each page of a document, but with one exception. Page 1 would have NO page number, then the numbers would start on page 2 and continue from there. Kind of an unusual thing, but that’s how she always did it and apparently it was easy to do in MS Word 2007.
Turns out it’s not so easy in the new version of Word! I had to do a bit of research, but I figured out how to do it. The next step was to remote in to her computer and show her how to do it.
But for this instruction, I did not want to use one of her documents. I just wanted a “dummy” document of about 10 pages, so it wouldn’t matter if it got all messed up.
There are actually a couple of ways to do this: the old way, and the easier way.
The old way is to use the Lorem Ipsum website (lipsum.com). What is Lorem Ipsum? The website explains it. But all you have to do is choose how many characters or paragraphs you want in your document, and click the Generate button. There are roughly 5 paragraphs per page, so if you opt for 50 paragraphs, you’ll get 10 pages of Latin text. Then you can just copy and paste that into a Word document, and there you have it – your 10 page dummy document.
But I think the new way is much easier.
Just open a new blank Word document, and type this:
=lorem(50,20)
When you type that and hit Enter, you will immediately see that this formerly blank document now has 50 paragraphs of Latin text, with each paragraph containing 20 sentences.
Depending on how much dummy text you need, you can put whatever numbers you want in the parentheses. The first number is how many paragraphs you want, and the second one is the number of sentences in each of those paragraphs.
Go ahead, open Word and try it out!
The post How to create a huge dummy Word document quickly first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

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