gldtkn77gary said:
Hi Jon:
Thank you for your suggestion. I visited your site but I don't see what
I'm after...I need the formula to create a bell-shaped graph. Do you know
it?
I'll leave Jon to reply to this fully but I have used Jon's suggestion of
NORMSINV(RAND()) to generate values from a normal distribution and I have
also used the noticeably faster sum of uniform deviates method taken as
[RAND() +RAND() +..to 12 values ] -6. I have compared the results with
FREQUENCY and, with a few thousand calculated values, FREQUENCY gives quite
a good bell-shaped curve with either method. It sounds a bit cumbersome but
it only takes a few seconds. There are polynomial approximations but they
seem very cumbersome for a one off calculation and another approach might be
to search on the Web for a tabulation.