Hello,

I am trying to use excel to probabilistically choose 1 option from a set based on a percent or distribution. Is this possible?

For example:

If I wanted to assign a characteristic such as race and had the following categories: Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian, African American and Other. Then I had a % of the population that each of these categories was comprised of such as 35%, 20%, 15%, 20%, and 10% respectively. Then I wanted to basically ask a cell or list of cells to randomly choose one of the values based on the percentages. So that if I populated 100 cells the percentage in which I encountered each category would be approximately equal to the given percents but all assigned randomly. The end result is to help me randomly populate a list containing a bunch of characteristics to get the characteristics for a random person for some healthcare research. For instance, I might have race, income level, education level, age, ect, and each category would randomly be assigned to a given person based on the overall population data so that all of the random assignments depict a single person.

If this doesn't quite make sense, please let me know. Any help is greatly appreciated!