Excel Simulations

**keine ahnung** · 10-04-2011, 07:59 PM

Hi all,

Always been a big fan of this site, first time posting though. I'm trying to do a statistics problem via Excel and I realized I have no idea how to run simulations.

The rundown:

A company mails surveys to 150, the non-response rate is .45 and the response rate is correspondingly .55

It first asks me to find the probability that at least 90 responses will be received, which I think I did correctly by plugging in =1-BINOM.DIST(90,150,0.55,1)

The second part of the question is: "Use 500 replications in your simulation. Based on this, the probability of getting at least 110 responses equals..."

My question is, how do I do this simulation in question? Quite frankly, I have no idea what it is referring to and how to do it in Excel. My teacher said we do not need tools outside of Excel. I thought about using something RAND() related, but that's about as far as I got.

Thanks!

**scottylad2** · 10-04-2011, 09:20 PM

you need to do 200 surveys to get 110 responses

**shg** · 10-05-2011, 01:20 AM

Maybe I'm missing this, but ...

1. That chance that you get 90 or more responses is 1 - the probability that you get at most 89 reponses, i.e.,

=1-BINOMDIST(89, 150, 0.55, TRUE)

That gives the same answer (0.12508...) as

=BINOMDIST(150-90, 150, 0.45, TRUE)

... as expected

2. BINOMDIST(150-40, 155, 0.45, TRUE) returns a very small number (about 1/350,000), so 500 runs of random trials is unlikely to see any cases with that is true, and certainly won't provide a reliable estimate.

BINOM.DIST is an Excel 2010 function; your profile shows 2003. Would you please change it to the version you use?

Excel Simulations

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