One way I made my workday more fun

Edit: apparently this blog decided it would be cool to resize my images below so that you can't see all of the interesting or relevant parts of the images....but I can see them....I'm leaving them in though. So you can share my frustration.

I use a spreadsheet all day every day at work that, really, no one else sees. Its a daily log that i clear out at the end of each day. It's boring. 

So I decided to give myself a little encouragement and enjoyment throughout the day in a non-predictable pattern, because everything else on my sheet is boring day after day. Here's what I did:

In this bright yellow box on the right (j3:k6), I have a randomly-generated message. That message is pulled from a bank on a separate sheet (in my case I named that other sheet "Text").

My formula has two ranges it pulls from. Column B has salutary, "Good Morning" type messages (you'll see how I used them here in a minute, and column A has all the other messages. 

So, if a2 is blank, which, after the column heading is my first job position, then the cell is blank, otherwise, if the second job position is blank (a3), that is, after the first job but before the second, it pulls a message from column B on the "Text" sheet. Otherwise, that is, if a2 and a3 are neither one blank, it pulls a message from column A.

Now the randomizing bit is there, and it's pretty simple: 

Say your list of cells you want to randomly display is a1:a5, then your function would be:

=index(a1:a5, rand()*rows(a1:a5)+1)