I guess not all of us have the time and imagination to think up realistic test data, especially when we need about 8,000 rows of it. Here are some tools that might help you out:
Lorem Ipsum – The classic “filler” text used by typesetters everywhere. This stuff is great because you can generate specific character amounts, and it has no unusual formatting (just full stops, commas, whitespace and alphabet characters). Not very realistic? True, but if you want realistic, you can go to just about any online document and grab text from there. This is nice and sanitised so you know exactly what’s in there.
GenerateData.com – Great for creating large amounts of custom data, particularly user data. It generates the data in a few different formats, including Excel, CSV and SQL – really handy for importing.
Fake Name Generator – Creates user data based on gender, name set (language) and country. Great for seeing how your app fares against foreign names. For fans of The Sims, it even has a generator for naming a whole Sims family.
I found out about some of these tools from Quick Testing Tips and @dailytestingtip. Thanks guys!