The Playground

I got an email forwarded to me tonight that got me searching the net for an answer and what I found was quite interesting.

The email was titled "Hidden program in Microsoft word"

Explain this :

Open a new Word document and type:

=rand(200,99)

then press ENTER.

Wait for three seconds and look again...

Not even Microsoft people can explain that one!

Now I found it hard to believe that the people from Microsoft would not be able to explain. I thought it might be a hidden Easter Egg, a quirky little trick that some programmers add as a bit of fun.

I found a great explanation at Web Tips:

If you are using Office 2003 you will get this ..

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

repeated in 200 paragraphs, with each paragraph saying it 99 times. Since the sentence covers each and every character of the English alphabet, its presumably a built in macro to test out fonts for generating sample texts.

But surprisingly, if you use MS Office 2007, you wont get that result. Instead you will get a nice paragraph that starts with ..

On the insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document.

which is a kind of manual of exciting new features of Word 2007! An uninterrupted effort by Microsoft to popularise their product I guess.

Here's one more MS Word trick for you ..

How to change a selected text to all caps, small caps in MS Word?

Select the text you want to change and press SHIFT + F3 key. Press again. And again .. Enjoy!