How to Generate a Normal Distribution in Excel

by Tutor Aspire January 17, 2023

To generate a normal distribution in Excel, you can use the following formula:

=NORMINV(RAND(), MEAN, STANDARD_DEVIATION)

You can then copy this formula down to as many cells in Excel as you’d like, depending on how large you’d like the dataset to be.

The following step-by-step example shows how to use this formula to generate a normal distribution in Excel.

First, let’s choose a mean and a standard deviation that we’d like for our normal distribution.

For simplicity, we’ll choose 0 for the mean and 1 for the standard deviation:

Next, we’ll use the following formula to generate a single normally distributed random variable:

=NORMINV(RAND(), $B$1, $B$2)

The following screenshot shows how to do so:

Next, we can simply copy and paste this formula down to as many cells as we’d like.

For example, we may copy and paste this formula to a total of 20 cells:

The end result is a normally distributed dataset with a mean of 0, standard deviation of 1, and sample size of 20.

Note: You can quickly generate a brand new dataset that follows a normal distribution by simply double clicking on any cell and pressing Enter.