• Mac OS X,  Windows XP

    Produce Random Complex Passwords in Excel

    Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time normalizing data in Excel. And when I needed to generate a bunch of passwords for a project, I almost switched to another tool to do so. But I decided that I was already in Excel so I might as well do it there. Excel has a couple of random (pseudorandom) number and character functions in RAND() and RANDBETWEEN(). In its simplest, let’s just pick a number between one and ten: =RANDBETWEEN(1,10) Now let’s pick a number that’s 9 characters after a decimal: =RAND() Or make it a regular nine character number: =RAND()*1000000000 Regrettably numbers are OK for passwords. So let’s bump up…