Ever wanted to make a random sentence or text? You can use Excel formulas to make totally random sentences. This is a great way to generate test data or dummy data-sets.
There are two ways to make the random sentences. You can use dynamic arrays in Excel 365 or regular functions in older versions.
Random sentences formula – Excel 365 with dynamic arrays
See next section if you are using older versions of Excel (2016 / 2013 etc.)
A random sentence is nothing but random string made of alphabets & punctuation. For sake of simplicity, let’s limit the character set to {a..z}, space and period.
The formula
=SUBSTITUTE(
SUBSTITUTE(
CONCAT( CHAR( RANDARRAY(120,1,97,124,TRUE) )),
"{",". ")
,"|"," ")
How random sentence formula works?
Let’s go from inside.
RANDARRAY(120,1, 97,124, TRUE): This dynamic array function generates a list of 120 random integers between 97 and 124.
Wait a sec… what the function is RANDARRAY?
RANDARRAY is a part of newly introduced dynamic array functions in Excel 365. This function, just like other DA functions (FILTER, UNIQUE, SORT etc.) can generate an array of items and spill them out on the spreadsheet.
Read up more about RANDARRAY function.
Why 97 and 124?
Because 97 stands for “a” in computer code and 122 stands for “z” in computer code (ASCII code). We need two more numbers for SPACE and PERIOD.
CHAR(RANDARRAY(..)): This will turn the random numbers in to equivalent letters (a to z { and |)
CONCAT(CHAR(…)): This concatenates all the letters to one giant 120 letter string.
SUBSTITUTE(CONCAT(…), “{“, ” “): This replaces all { with SPACE.
SUBSTITUTE(…, “|”, “. “): This replaces all | with PERIOD-SPACE.
The result
We will end up with a random sentence. Just recalc (F9) to make a new sentence.
Lorem ipsum with Excel formulas – All versions
What if you don’t have RANDARRAY? Well, you can a simple formula to generate standing typesetting text – Lorem ipsum…
Lorem ipsum formula
First place the sample “Lorem ipsum” paragraph in a cell, say F6. You can download the entire paragraph from lipsum.com. Alternatively, you will find this in the sample Excel file too.
Now use below formula to fetch random words (between 9 to 16) from the text.
=LEFT($F$6,
FIND("#",
SUBSTITUTE($F$6," ","#",RANDBETWEEN(9,16))))
How this formula works?
This formula is a lot simpler than the RANDARRAY based one.
Going from inside,
- RANDBETWEEN(9,16) generates a random number
- SUBSTITUTE replaces that random space with # symbol
- FIND gets the location of #
- LEFT returns the words in F6 from left until it found that # symbol
Random Sentence Formulas – Explained
In case you are still foggy about the details of these formulas, check out below video. You can also watch it on my Youtube channel.
Download sample file – Random sentence formula
Click here to download the sample file to make random sentences. Examine the formulas to learn more about RANDARRAY, CONCAT, SUBSTITUTE, FIND and CHAR functions.
12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.