How do I sum all the combinations of a potential set of numbers?

May 9, 2009 8:59 AM

I have a group of numbers (4,5,10,53,1.5) and I want to display a graph showing the distribution of outcomes if I pick an arbitrary percent out of the the group and sum them. This has to be incredibly simple, what is the name for what I am trying to do? Or how can I do this in Excel?

I think in mathematica you would total a subset which would just spit out a list, I didn't know if there was a way to do this in Excel and put in a nice chart showing like "this uses 10% of the numbers, this uses 100%" etc.

posted by geoff. to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Oh it is a binomial distribution, duh.
posted by geoff. at 9:33 AM on May 9, 2009

I think the only way you can do it is writing it in VB, I just did it in Mathematica manually, total subset() from my link works fine, I can take these values and plot them on a graph in Excel.
posted by geoff. at 12:41 PM on May 9, 2009

Would you just produce the chart in Mathematica?
posted by hAndrew at 9:06 PM on May 9, 2009

Yeah, but the response needs to be in the original Excel document, so I thought I should stay in the native Excel look and feel.
posted by geoff. at 9:28 PM on May 9, 2009