how do you create a standard normal distribution chart?

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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?
Gary
 
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.
 
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 may be mistaken as to why you want the bell-shaped curve but, if it's only
a one-off application, perhaps the best thing would be to type in 20-30
values from a standard tabulation and run a smoothed scatter plot thro'
them. There is not a simple formula, AFAIK.

Jim.
 
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