Comments on: How do I sum all the combinations of a potential set of numbers? http://ask.metafilter.com/121665/How-do-I-sum-all-the-combinations-of-a-potential-set-of-numbers/ Comments on Ask MetaFilter post How do I sum all the combinations of a potential set of numbers? Sat, 09 May 2009 09:33:29 -0800 Sat, 09 May 2009 09:33:29 -0800 en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 Question: How do I sum all the combinations of a potential set of numbers? http://ask.metafilter.com/121665/How-do-I-sum-all-the-combinations-of-a-potential-set-of-numbers 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? <br /><br /> I think in mathematica you would <a href="http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Subsets.html">total a subset</a> 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. post:ask.metafilter.com,2009:site.121665 Sat, 09 May 2009 08:59:37 -0800 geoff. subset total sum resolved By: geoff. http://ask.metafilter.com/121665/How-do-I-sum-all-the-combinations-of-a-potential-set-of-numbers#1740011 Oh it is a binomial distribution, duh. comment:ask.metafilter.com,2009:site.121665-1740011 Sat, 09 May 2009 09:33:29 -0800 geoff. By: geoff. http://ask.metafilter.com/121665/How-do-I-sum-all-the-combinations-of-a-potential-set-of-numbers#1740197 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. comment:ask.metafilter.com,2009:site.121665-1740197 Sat, 09 May 2009 12:41:04 -0800 geoff. By: hAndrew http://ask.metafilter.com/121665/How-do-I-sum-all-the-combinations-of-a-potential-set-of-numbers#1740562 Would you just produce the chart in Mathematica? comment:ask.metafilter.com,2009:site.121665-1740562 Sat, 09 May 2009 21:06:32 -0800 hAndrew By: geoff. http://ask.metafilter.com/121665/How-do-I-sum-all-the-combinations-of-a-potential-set-of-numbers#1740571 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. comment:ask.metafilter.com,2009:site.121665-1740571 Sat, 09 May 2009 21:28:59 -0800 geoff.