FROM Langalist  4/12/00
(The Best Free / NO SPAM Tech Letter)

 Easter Eggs

What better time of year to discuss "easter eggs?" No, not the avian
variety; but rather snippets of playful code that developers bury within
their software. When you find and trigger that code, you often get a for-
fun surprise that's sometimes functional, but other times totally
unrelated to the main function of the software.

Here's a semi-functional one:

     Hi Fred! Love the Plus Edition! I don't know if you know this
     Easter Egg yet, but I thought I'd send you it since, well,
     Easter is coming up soon! <g> Open up Microsoft Word and type
     the following line and hit Enter (read the next paragraph
     before doing so)

     =rand(#,#)

     Replace the #'s with any number. To ruin the surprise (in case
     you think that this will freeze or damage your computer), this
     one-liner Easter Egg will create the following line "The quick
     brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." depending on the numbers
     you insert in the parentheses. The first number represents the
     number of paragraphs and the second number represents how many
     times you want that line in each paragraph. So if you entered
     10 and 5, ten paragraphs with five "The quick brown fox jumps
     over the lazy dog." lines each will appear. Try it! This works
     in Office 97, Office 2000 AND Office XP.---Kevin Guertin

Thanks, Kevin! That's a hidden function, and can be considered an Egg.
However, the more classic Easter Egg often praises or extols the
software developers in some extravagant fashion; or provides a kind of
comic relief from the seriousness of the main program. For example, you
can find a huge pile of all kinds of  Eggs to try at
http://www.eggheaven2000.com/