A look at a free add-in from Sam Radakovitz on the Excel team. This tool lets you create fake data or sample data. If you need Excel data for your next book, blog post, YouTube video, or just to make it look like you've been hard at work, the Fake Data tool makes it easy to create the data.
Download from Fake Data — Sam Radakovitz
Table of Contents
(0:00) Introduction
(0:32) Generating tables of fake data
(1:19) Adding columns to existing data
(2:50) Changing case in Excel data
(3:21) Cleaning web characters from data
(4:20) Wrap up
Download from Fake Data — Sam Radakovitz
Table of Contents
(0:00) Introduction
(0:32) Generating tables of fake data
(1:19) Adding columns to existing data
(2:50) Changing case in Excel data
(3:21) Cleaning web characters from data
(4:20) Wrap up
Transcript of the video:
Learn Excel from MrExcel podcast episode 2361.
Create fake data in Excel. Fake data. Mockup data. Sample data.
I use it all the time in my books. I have a bunch of data sets. Or I create fake data.
I will tell you what. I've been using this new free add-in from Sam Rad on the Excel team.
Holy smokes! It is so easy to use.
(Hey, another all-nighter video we are about three hours and 12 minutes away from the launch of the Delta IV NROL44 mission).
Here is the add-in from Sam. Use the Sample data group.
Oh my gosh. It is so simple.
Actually when I do this, you will see where I've gotten the data for the past several podcasts.
Because it all came from this: Table, Sales Data. Bam!
There it is: Item, Buyer,City, State, Phone, Sold, Paid, Cost, Quantity, and Total.
It is so easy. There are a different number of rows every time.
Just an amazing tool. The little lightning bolt here.
Select Table, Books. You get Author, Pages, Released.
Whether or not it's been read, and cost. Ask for Table, People.
You get First Name, Last Name, Address, City, State, E-Mail, Marital Status, and Balance.
Here let's create another fake data set.
Using the sales table.
So here's the data set that I have. And I want to add some things to it. I need some full names.
Bam! That's done. Or just first names. Just last names. Add email addresses.
Add companies.
Book titles. Products.
A series of colors: pale pink, purple taupe, Portland orange.
Or here: Yes/No. You get a series of Yes or No.
For Number, you can choose whole numbers, decimal numbers, percents, money, credit cards, or social security numbers.
Phone numbers. It will generate all of those.
I love this one. From Address, I will choose City.
Now we have a series of cities.
And then I am going to come over to the next column. Notice I am just choosing one cell.
It detects how many rows are in the adjacent data.
So, I have cities.
When I add state, the Add-in is smart enough to fgure out that Dallas is in Texas.
McKinney is in Texas. Hampton is in Virginia.
Cleveland is in Ohio. It is an awesome tool.
For dates, choose Month, Year, or Time. It will insert them.
Sam just added this feature here called change case.
Let's come back here to Buyer.
I can change case to uppercase, lowercase, or proper case.
Or for a book title, I can go to sentence case which capitalizes just the first letter and everything else is lowercase.
Now, there is no undo make sure to be doing this on a copy of your data.
The other thing here next to Change Case is Clean.
The very first thing that I thought of is Character 160.
Anytime you grab data from a website the character 160s are so annoying, because the TRIM function won't recognize character 160.
There would be some version of me, living in an alternate universe, where I would say, "Hey Microsoft, could you please fix TRIM to handle both character 32 and character 160".
But now it's not an issue anymore so I take this data that has a lot of character 160s.
Under Clean, choose Clean non-printing characters.
Sam takes all those character 160s, replaces them with character 32s.
And does the TRIM. This add-in is awesome and it is free.
The URL is down in the YouTube description. Download it.
You'll be creating fake data for your next book, podcast, Youtube video, or just to make it look like you've been working like crazy when your boss walks in. Down below this video, please Like, Subscribe, and Ring the Bell.
Feel free to post any questions or comments down in the YouTube comments below.
I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Create fake data in Excel. Fake data. Mockup data. Sample data.
I use it all the time in my books. I have a bunch of data sets. Or I create fake data.
I will tell you what. I've been using this new free add-in from Sam Rad on the Excel team.
Holy smokes! It is so easy to use.
(Hey, another all-nighter video we are about three hours and 12 minutes away from the launch of the Delta IV NROL44 mission).
Here is the add-in from Sam. Use the Sample data group.
Oh my gosh. It is so simple.
Actually when I do this, you will see where I've gotten the data for the past several podcasts.
Because it all came from this: Table, Sales Data. Bam!
There it is: Item, Buyer,City, State, Phone, Sold, Paid, Cost, Quantity, and Total.
It is so easy. There are a different number of rows every time.
Just an amazing tool. The little lightning bolt here.
Select Table, Books. You get Author, Pages, Released.
Whether or not it's been read, and cost. Ask for Table, People.
You get First Name, Last Name, Address, City, State, E-Mail, Marital Status, and Balance.
Here let's create another fake data set.
Using the sales table.
So here's the data set that I have. And I want to add some things to it. I need some full names.
Bam! That's done. Or just first names. Just last names. Add email addresses.
Add companies.
Book titles. Products.
A series of colors: pale pink, purple taupe, Portland orange.
Or here: Yes/No. You get a series of Yes or No.
For Number, you can choose whole numbers, decimal numbers, percents, money, credit cards, or social security numbers.
Phone numbers. It will generate all of those.
I love this one. From Address, I will choose City.
Now we have a series of cities.
And then I am going to come over to the next column. Notice I am just choosing one cell.
It detects how many rows are in the adjacent data.
So, I have cities.
When I add state, the Add-in is smart enough to fgure out that Dallas is in Texas.
McKinney is in Texas. Hampton is in Virginia.
Cleveland is in Ohio. It is an awesome tool.
For dates, choose Month, Year, or Time. It will insert them.
Sam just added this feature here called change case.
Let's come back here to Buyer.
I can change case to uppercase, lowercase, or proper case.
Or for a book title, I can go to sentence case which capitalizes just the first letter and everything else is lowercase.
Now, there is no undo make sure to be doing this on a copy of your data.
The other thing here next to Change Case is Clean.
The very first thing that I thought of is Character 160.
Anytime you grab data from a website the character 160s are so annoying, because the TRIM function won't recognize character 160.
There would be some version of me, living in an alternate universe, where I would say, "Hey Microsoft, could you please fix TRIM to handle both character 32 and character 160".
But now it's not an issue anymore so I take this data that has a lot of character 160s.
Under Clean, choose Clean non-printing characters.
Sam takes all those character 160s, replaces them with character 32s.
And does the TRIM. This add-in is awesome and it is free.
The URL is down in the YouTube description. Download it.
You'll be creating fake data for your next book, podcast, Youtube video, or just to make it look like you've been working like crazy when your boss walks in. Down below this video, please Like, Subscribe, and Ring the Bell.
Feel free to post any questions or comments down in the YouTube comments below.
I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
