Weird Microsoft Word Trick?

Type this into a new Microsoft Word document: = rand (200, 99) Then press enter. Why does this happen???

Weird Microsoft Word Trick?mcaffee

Like jokes, urban legends, and virus hoaxes, tips about Word鈥檚 little-used or undocumented features periodically makes their way around the Internet, occasioning a wave of postings in Word newsgroups. One of these is =rand(), which is sometimes represented as an Easter egg, sometimes feared as a possible virus. It is neither. It is a Word function (undocumented in the online Help but documented in the Microsoft Knowledge Base) that can be useful in certain circumstances.

The rand function

The Microsoft Knowledge Base article How to Insert Sample Text into a Document in Word [212251] explains the use and syntax of the function:

Microsoft Word allows you to quickly insert sample text into a document. To do this, type =rand() in the document where you want the text to appear, and then press ENTER.

The inserted text is that hardy perennial: 鈥淭he quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,鈥?which contains every letter in the English alphabet.

By default, the sample text contains three paragraphs, each containing five sentences. You can control how many paragraphs and sentences appear by adding numbers inside the parentheses, for instance:

=rand(3,4)

The first number is the number of paragraphs, and the second the number of sentences per paragraph. If you omit the second number, you get five sentences in each paragraph. So, for example: