Random date generation formula successfully copiedĪnd with these last two sections, we have finished generating the dates for the fake orders and have learned how to copy a formula to multiple cells with two different methods. This is achieved by either pressing Ctrl+D or by selecting the Fill Down option in the menu. Now you have all the cells of the Date column selected, up to the one that already has a date created, and we can fill the empty ones. To select the remaining cells of that column, press the Ctrl+Shift+Up Arrow key combination. This means now you have the last cell of the Date column selected. Move the cursor to the last cell of the Order ID column (Ctrl+Down arrow while having a cell of that column selected) and then press the right arrow. Since we have an adjacent column of the size we want to select, we can do it with simple keyboard shortcuts. Imagine, selecting a thousand rows, by hand.
But we are not going to use the mouse for this. ( Copy formula to multiple cells with Fill )įor the first method, using the Fill feature, we need to select all the cells which we want to copy the formula into. The first uses the Fill feature we’ve seen previously, the second is a literal copy and paste after selecting the desired range (by typing the range, not by selecting with the mouse!). What about the remaining 999 orders? Let me show you two ways of achieving this. Okay, all is well, but we have only generated the date for a single order. Don’t worry though, at the end of the demo we’ll make these randomly generated values fixed. Pressing F9 or any interaction with the workbook recalculates the formulas, i.e., generates another random date. However, the cell displays the generated value as a date because we formatted this column in the beginning to be of the date data type.
Create a second worksheet by pressing the plus button in the footerīy the way, keep in mind that RANDBETWEEN generates an integer, even if we have given it dates to choose from. By default it has one worksheet, but that first one will be used for our dataset. Open Microsoft Excel and create a new blank workbook.
We’ll have that data written in a second worksheet, used exclusively for look up when generating data for our table. Since we’ll need to randomly choose values for our table, such as the quantity purchased, or look up values in a given range, like the price of a product, it would be good to have those values available somewhere to refer to. Now that you’ve been introduced to the demo, let’s talk about the helper data used for look up. Our purpose with this exercise is to become more familiar with manipulating data, both creating new data and making use of already existing data (via look up). A real sales table could never have this structure. However, before going further, please understand the data included in this table is included just for the sake of practicing Excel. For instance, given the customer id, use the name of that customer. The other thing that will be quite important is to have a worksheet from where we can look up values. With the cross join you can generate a total combination of 341,658,256 users for your tests.For the effect, we will mostly make use of random choice of values and number generation. We will use a cross join to generate all the possible combinations of names and last names. In the first example, we will use the DimCustomer table from the AdventureWorksDW database mentioned in the requirements.
In this article, we will give you some useful T-SQL tips that may help or at least inspire you on this.
That is why, it is very important to generate data and test the software with millions of rows. If the provider had tested the software with millions of rows, this problem would have never happened. The customer sued to the software provider and lawyers were needed to create a resolution. The problem was not SQL Server, the problem was the application, which was not designed for tables with millions of rows. I once had a customer with software that worked fine in the demo with 30 rows, but after some months, the software had more than a million rows and it became very slow. In this article, we will talk about generating random values for testing purposes.