From the course: Learning Excel: Data Analysis

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 26,000 courses taught by industry experts.

Calculate normal probabilities with NORM.DIST

Calculate normal probabilities with NORM.DIST - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Learning Excel: Data Analysis

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Calculate normal probabilities with NORM.DIST

“

In business, we often need to estimate how likely it is that a measurement falls within a certain range. For example, how likely is an order to be delivered within five days? Or how likely is a package to weigh less than a certain limit? Or how likely is a customer's spend to be above a target amount? These values don't usually all land on the average. Some are lower, some are higher. Many tend to cluster somewhere near the middle. When that pattern is roughly bell-shaped, the normal distribution can help us estimate probabilities. That's where the normal distribution function is useful. In this data set we're looking at customer orders. Each order has a delivery time in days and we want to answer questions like how likely is an order to be delivered within a certain number of days? To use NORM.DIST we need three inputs. First the value we're testing, second the mean or average, and third the standard deviation which tells us how spread out the values are. And then we need to decide…

Contents