You’ll see the table grow by several rows and the first column will now have ID Numbers filled down to wherever you released. Now, highlight cell A2 again and grab the fill handle (that heavy dot in the lower right corner of the cell) and drag it straight down several rows and let go. This will just use the row number as the customer ID number. We’ll insert an ID number field to simulate a customer record number. Each of the sections below will highlight what you need to enter in each cell with an explanation for each. Now, we’ll move on to Row 2 and start putting the formulas into your worksheet. Also make sure the My table has headers checkbox is selected. In the Format As Table dialog box, be sure that your range is set to “=$A$1:$N$1”. On the HOME tab, select Format as Table and select any of the table styles that shows up. These should span from Column A thru Column N if we’re on the same page at this point.Ĭlick anywhere in that first line of text fields you just entered. ID Number, First Name, Last Name, Full Name, Gender, DOB, Age, City, State, Zip, Phone Number, Retired, Recent Medical Exam, Account Comments To kick this off, in Row number 1 create the following headings starting in Column A. In addition to the standard Excel functions, the following functions from the Excel PowerUps Premium Suite (free download from this site) will be key to easily generating random demographic data. Next I’ll outline the formulas used for each of the fields to generate random demographic data. Account Comments – Here we’ll just generate some random text to represent something being typed into a customer record.Recent Medical Exam – We’ll make this field return a value based both on the person’s Retirement Status, Gender as well as an arbitrary likelihood that a retired person of a given gender would have had a Recent Medical Exam.Retirement Status – We’ll make this field return a value based on the person’s age and an arbitrary likelihood that a person of that age may be retired.Phone Number – This will be a basic phone number pattern.Note that the City, State Zip combination in this example is not limited to an actually valid City, State Zip combination. Zip – A random number that looks like a zip code.Age – This will be computed based on the Date of Birth and today’s date.Date of Birth – A randomly generated date value.We’ll also drive the generation of the First Name field with the Gender value. Gender – This will either male or female, obviously.Full Name – We’ll make this show up as last name, first name.First Name – These will either be male or female as designated.You can extend this example to add any number of additional data types to suit your needs. In this illustration we’ll generate data for the following demographic data elements. You’ll have to leave less up to the imagination for your product owners or stakeholders. Other tasks such as product demos can be more realistic with randomly generated data. This will help you more appropriately run performance and stress testing on your application.Īdditionally, using realistic data values instead of “asdf…” everywhere will make it easier for your testers to spot inconsistencies and other unexpected data issues. You’re actual customer data set may be relatively small and generating your own data gives you the ability to massively scale up the amount of data you test with. Other Benefits of Generating Random Demographic Data There are complex regulations that you don’t want to run afoul of, but most of all you want to protect your customer’s sensitive data – you’d want nothing less for your own data. You wouldn’t want to risk exposing PII (Personally Identifiable Information) or other sensitive information.Īlso, some of the data you may need to test would be restricted or protected under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and/or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Due to the nature of the data, it may be unfeasible for you to access real data to test your application or process. They primarily center on testing scenarios. There are several reasons I can think of that you would want to or need to generate random demographic data. Facebook Tweet Pin LinkedIn Print How to Generate Random Demographic Data Why Generate Random Demographic Data?
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