Excel - Creating Fake Data in Excel Made Easy with Sam Rad's Free Add-In - Episode 2361

Microsoft Excel Tutorial: Creating Fake Data in Excel Made Easy with Sam Rad's Free Add-In.

Welcome to another episode of the MrExcel podcast, where we dive into all things Excel. In today's episode, we're going to talk about creating fake data in Excel. Whether you call it fake data, mockup data, or sample data, it's a useful tool that I use all the time in my books and projects. And let me tell you, I've recently discovered a game-changing free add-in from Sam Rad on the Excel team that makes creating fake data a breeze.

In this video, I'll show you how to use the Sample data group in Sam's add-in to quickly generate realistic data sets for your projects. It's so simple and easy to use that I've been using it for the past several podcasts. With just a few clicks, you can create a table with columns such as Item, Buyer, City, State, Phone, Sold, Paid, Cost, Quantity, and Total. And the best part? The number of rows can vary each time, making it perfect for creating different data sets.

But that's not all, the add-in also has options for generating data for tables such as Books, People, and Sales. You can choose from a variety of data types like names, addresses, email addresses, book titles, products, and even colors. And for numbers, you can select from whole numbers, decimal numbers, percents, money, credit cards, and social security numbers. It's a one-stop-shop for all your fake data needs.

One of my favorite features of this add-in is the ability to change the case of your data. You can easily convert text to uppercase, lowercase, proper case, or even sentence case for book titles. And if you have data with non-printing characters, the add-in has a clean function that will remove them and trim your data. It's a lifesaver when dealing with data copied from websites.

I highly recommend downloading this add-in and giving it a try. It's perfect for creating fake data for your next book, podcast, YouTube video, or just to impress your boss. And while you're here, don't forget to like, subscribe, and ring the bell to stay updated on all our Excel tips and tricks. And if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them down below in the YouTube comments. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next episode of the MrExcel podcast.

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
(4:07) Clicking Like really helps the algorithm

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Using the Sam Rad add-in for fake data creation

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.

[jessy]

Thank you so much this is helping alot

[ExcelOffTheGrid]

Thanks for sharing this. I spend hours making fake data, so this will be really helpful.

[wayneedmondson]

WOW! What a cool add-in. Thanks so much for sharing it. Thumbs up!

[carlosvillavicencio]

Been waiting for this a loooong time. Thnxs a huge lot...

[excelisfun]

Killer tool! I always do it long hand with different stats distribution functions. I wonder what the distributions are for this randomization? Normal, Uniform, , Exponential and so on.

[davidg.]

That is absolutely awesome! Thanks Bill! And mainly thanks to Sam 😁

[ihavethepowerquery]

Thanks Mr Excel and Sam for this one. I like to play around with Benford's Law so I can't wait to play around with this data. Now, if someone could just generate a huge financial data set for a company....

[JonathanExcels]

there are also 3 mask options. you get beginning and end from the drop down, but if you simply hit the button it does the middle.

[JimFikes]

This is going to save me tons of time! Thanks.

[chrismcneil]

This is great. Thank you for sharing !!

[ohdjrp]

Thanks Sam! He seems like a cool dude!
Thanks MrExcel!

[JonathanExcels]

cool. if you select a range of cells, and then use the text feature, it adds text to the selected range.

[Sal_A]

Oh yeah I need this to pretend I'm working when my boss walks by not knowing the data is ersatz 😁

[garethmorrall]

How do you change the sample data tables. E.g. if I wanted to change the American address fields to UK address data? Many Thanks

[GeertDelmulle]

I just did exactly the same as what you showed in this video: play around with the options (indeed there is no undo) and be amazed at what came out. WOW, just: WOW! No more excuses for generating sample data: that complexity just got >>crushed<< !
Thanks again for bringing this to our attention. :-)

[mhedyalkhaldi]

How can we edit and add some new data to it or even maybe translate it

[MySpreadsheetLab]

Awesome add-in! Do you happen to have the password for the vba module? I'd love to see how it works.

[simfinso]

Which version this Function is Supporting?