 Statistics and Excel. Poisson Distribution Roller Coaster Line Example. Get ready, taking a deep breath, holding it in for 10 seconds, getting ready for a smooth soothing. Excel. Here we are in Excel. If you don't have access to this workbook, that's okay because we'll basically build this from a blank worksheet, but if you do have access, three tabs down below. Example Practice Blank. Example, in essence, Answer Key. Practice tab having pre-formatted cells so you can get right to the heart of the practice problem. Blank tab, basically a blank worksheet except for this image on it, but you don't really need that to move forward so that we can practice formatting the cells within Excel as we work through the practice problem. Let's go to the example tab to get an idea of where we will be going, working with the Poisson Distribution, which often deals with line waiting situations as it will be with our example here, line waiting situations for a roller coaster. We're actually first going to be thinking about and imagining the mirroring of a situation where we're sitting with a stopwatch at the line to see how many people arrive during certain intervals, and then we'll make observations of that data, the observation basically being that it seems to be following a Poisson type distribution, at least for the most part, and then we'll use our Poisson Dot Dist to plot a curve in accordance with the Poisson Distribution and the idea then being that possibly the Poisson Distribution curve can help us to make projections and predictions into the future about this particular data set. Let's go on to the Blank tab and start working our problem. So we're going to say that X is going to be, well let's first format the entire worksheet. I'm going to put my cursor on the triangle, right click on the worksheet. We're going to format the worksheet as we do every time. I'm going to make it currency and let's make it currency, negative numbers bracketed and red, no dollar sign. I'm going to start off with no decimals and then add the decimals as I need them. Okay, I'm going to scroll in just a little bit as well. All right, so now I'm going to say that X is going to be equal to the arrivals during one minute, one minute. I'm going to make the whole thing bold, putting my cursor on the triangle, home tab, font group, everything is bold and these are going to be arrivals for a roller coaster ride line. That's what we're measuring. So we're going to be sitting there with our stopwatch and we're going to be thinking and we're going to be measuring now or counting however many people arrive during each one minute time period. So it gets a little bit difficult to wrap your mind around so you're imagining you're sitting there with a stopwatch and you're every one minute you're starting to stopwatch, you're seeing how many people come in during that one minute time frame and we're marking that information down. Now we're going to want to try to mirror that information with our random generator in a similar way as we did with the dice rolling. So we're not going to use a simple formula. We're not just going to say this equals the random function between because the randomness has to be in accordance with the Poisson distribution. So there's still a random element but it has to be according to the distribution and in order to generate it we're going to have to give Excel the mean. So the mean we're going to say is, let's say the mean is going to be 2.75 and I'm going to add decimals to that cell, home tab, number group, adding some decimals. Now obviously if we were sitting there with our stopwatch we might not know the mean, that's what we're looking for but when we randomly generate the data we need to be able to have that in Excel for it to be able to generate the data. So we're going to now generate the data. To do that I'm going to go into the data here, I'm going to go into the analytics and you've got this data analysis. If you don't have that you can add it, you go to the file tab, you go to the options down below and then you want to go to the add-ins on the left and then in the add-ins you want the add-ins here, go and then you want to be picking that analysis tool pack and if that's checked off then you should have the analysis in the data tab analysis group. Okay so first I'm going to say where I want to put this so I'm going to say this is going to be the x data that we're calculating or finding. Let's make this black and white, font group, I'm going to make it black and white and center it and then I'm going to put my data right here and we're going to imagine we're counting a thousand periods of two minutes right so we got our stopwatch for a thousand