“It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” [E. W. Dijkstra]

Abstract

The application below is meant to help people who want to test properly.

You want to create six Boolean values, 50% True and 50% False, once in generated order and once shuffled? Here you are:

sbGenerateTestData_Bool_Screen

Or you need to create 4 money values in GBP, the first series between GBP 10 and GBP 20, the second should have an average of 6 and a standard deviation of 2?

sbGenerateTestData_Ccy_Screen

If you like to generate four dates between 1-Jan-2000 and 1-Jan-2013 or four dates with average 30-Jun-2012 and with a standard deviation of 180 (days):

sbGenerateTestData_Date_Screen

If you need 4 countries, one African, one Asian and two European; or you need 2 Asian and 2 European (drag tab “Countries” next right to tab “Data” so that it is tab #2!):

sbGenerateTestData_Countries

If you like to generate first names from a list, drag tab “First_Names” next right to tab “Data”, you get a warning, just press “Ok”:

sbGenerateTestData_First_Names

Note: It is not pure chance that columns of items and item groups in both tabs are identical here. Actually, I have created it this way, so that I can easily switch between creating first names or country names.

You can also generate correlated numbers with this application. I have implemented the Iman Conover method with VBA.

The spreadsheet tabs:

sbGenerateTestData_Tabs_Screen

Download

Please read my Disclaimer.

sbGenerateTestData.xlsm [149 KB Excel file, open and use at your own risk]