Generating a list of Random numbers of random length...

I've started a project involving demand/capacity and waiting list modelling in the healthcare sector. The tool is going to be used by people who don't have a lot of Excel experience. The organisation doesn't have the technical resources to maintain anything that contains any complex VBA.

First thing I'm doing is building forecasts of demand. There's a current pipeline of future demand scheduled in. That's not a problem. It's the future-future demand that I'm sort of struggling with. Writing it down helps.

I suspect that demand obeys the Poisson distribution. You could see 0,1,2,3 etc patients turning up on a particular day.

What I would like to do is create a refreshable list of the likes of -

Day 1
Day 1
Day 2
Day 4
Day 4
Day 4
Day 6

etc...

controlled by random numbers vs the poisson distribution without resorting to code and without days that had no activity appearing. I have an inkling of how to do but...

Well excel has a RAND() and POISSON() function, It's not very clear exactly how your list should be created though.

Yes, it's arrival dates. I don't have the granularity of data to model interarrival times - otherwise I'd use the Erlang distribution.

The project will have to use some code but I want to use as little as possible. I've worked in environments where the use of VBA is expressly forbidden. This isn't one of them but there's not a lot of VBA expertise in the organisation.