Charting Distribution with Skewness
 

I have some sales data that I am looking to chart based on it's
distribution. Using the NORMDIST function I was able to construct a
normal distribution chart for the mean and StDev of the data - however
how can I chart the data if it has a positive skew?

ie: Mean of 10, StDev of 5, and a Skewness of 1.28. I would like to
create a distribution curve based on those parameters.

Thank you!

Charting Distribution with Skewness
 

Hi,

The NORMDIST function does not support a skewness option. Excel has a SKEW
function but it only calculates the skew of your data, it doesn't apply the
skew to a distribution. So in other words there is nothing built into Excel
to do this.
--
Thanks,
Shane Devenshire


" wrote:

I have some sales data that I am looking to chart based on it's
distribution. Using the NORMDIST function I was able to construct a
normal distribution chart for the mean and StDev of the data - however
how can I chart the data if it has a positive skew?

ie: Mean of 10, StDev of 5, and a Skewness of 1.28. I would like to
create a distribution curve based on those parameters.

Thank you!

Charting Distribution with Skewness
 

Many distributions may have the same low order cumulants. GAMMADIST (which
is closely related to CHIDIST) is the most general skewed continuous
distribution natively provided in Excel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_distribution
gives the mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis in terms of the parameters
of the distribution. In particular, alpha=4 with beta=2.5 would have the
population mean=10 and population SD=5, but its population skewnss is 1.

Jerry

" wrote:

I have some sales data that I am looking to chart based on it's
distribution. Using the NORMDIST function I was able to construct a
normal distribution chart for the mean and StDev of the data - however
how can I chart the data if it has a positive skew?

ie: Mean of 10, StDev of 5, and a Skewness of 1.28. I would like to
create a distribution curve based on those parameters.

Thank you!