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How to generate dummy data for Excel

Sam

• 3 min read

Do you need to generate dummy data? It often happens during product development, testing, for demonstration purposes, or for academia.

I know we, at OfficeBots, need dummy data often. Mostly when we need to test new bots for quality assurance.

I’ve used the alternatives. There are a few dummy data generators you can find online, but found that they are mostly not great (so won’t link to them here, but a quick search should bring them up for you).

Here are the limitations I found:

  • You can only generate a limited number of records (eg 100 records for free or 5,000 records if you pay). We needed 100,000 records (or more), to test our bot’s processing speed – and didn’t want to spend the $500 price tag some sites propose for it.
  • Data is so random that street names are random words, so you can’t test mapping features with them. Even the ones advertising “realistic” data just try to make the addresses look real, which unfortunately doesn’t work to test mapping features.
  • They generate hard-coded data only, so no formulas in the spreadsheet.
  • You can’t generate a set of data with matching keys to test JOINs and lookups.
  • Data types are not varied enough (eg date only and not datetime.)

We built a new OfficeBot to address our own pains:

ExceleeDD

It is a Dummy Data generator with which you can generate dummy records for:

  • Companies
  • People
  • Products

But, most importantly, datasets generated have:

  • real addresses: while randomised, addresses are real-life addresses. You can test a new mapping app with that dataset!
    Note: we currently have addresses from Germany, the US and the UK. We can add more, as needed – don’t hesitate to ask!
  • various data types: text, numbers, dates, datetime and formulas!
  • matching keys between datasets: people, companies and products, all have hardcoded IDs. Just like in a proper database. So you can test lookups and JOINs.
  • proper company legal entity extensions, depending on the country. This was helpful to help us test data cleaning bots!

To generate dummy data, simply sign up (free) and send an email to:

dummydata@excel.officebots.io

If you send a blank email, you will get 50k dummy records of each (Company/People/Product).

Else, you can submit the category you need and the number of records in the subject line like that:

company: 100000

Wait a little, and the bot will send you back an email with an Excel spreadsheet attached with 100,000 dummy records of companies:

You can generate up to 150,000 records via email – but note that it will take a couple minutes for the bot to generate the file (we have not optimised for speed – yet!).

If you need a dummy dataset of up to 1,048,576 records (Excel’s max row), just contact us and we can send it to you (Note: a spreadsheet with 1,048,576 rows is ~100Mb) we tested.

We hope ExceleeDD will be useful to you, as it is to us.

Please let us know, if you would like to see other types of dummy data. We’ll be happy to extend ExceleeDD’s scope.

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