Random Sentence Generator using Excel

When my students come up to me to ask how they can practice making sentences, one of the things I always suggest is to just randomly pick some words from the chapter's vocabulary list and make a sentence out of them. Then they can come to me, or go to a tutor, and have the sentence evaluated for content and form. But somehow students seem to think that the process of randomly selecting sentence pieces doesn't make sense. To help them understand the concept I've created the Random Sentence Generator using Excel. There are two versions of this tool. The first generates a list of random words in Spanish that the students should then combine into a sentence, and the second generates a random list of words in English, that the students then need to translate into Spanish and then combine into a sentence. (Here is a copy of a Random Sentence Generator of the second type.) I've used these Random Sentence Generators several times in class and students really seem to like them! They especially have fun when the randomly generated list of words makes absolutely no sense, so they have to get creative! When we use this tool in class I usually provide them with four or five different lists of words, and then give them a few minutes to create their sentences, and finally I have them write their sentences on the board so that we can go over them as a class.

Technical Stuff:
The way the generator works is fairly straightforward. Put each vocabulary category into a single column. Then, use the formula:

=INDEX(Table14[Name],1+INT(RAND()*COUNTA(Table14[Name])))

Example (for a list of words contained in cells A11 through A20):

=INDEX(A$11:A$20,1+INT(RAND()*COUNTA(A$11:A$20)))

to have a word randomly selected from each column each time you refresh.