In this video, I want to show you how to generate your own random values. You might be able to type in values from an actual experiment, from actual patients,but when you start off, you might want to simulate some data. Now it is based in spreadsheet software to keep your variables in the columns. So imagine we're dealing with patients, this might be the patients H, that is our variable, the gender and the admission temperature. Admission temperature. There we go. Now every time that I'm done with a cell, I'm done typing, I hit the right arrow key to jump right. If I were to hit return or enter, I'll jump one cell down. Now this over here, went across two cells, and what I could do is just go up here to the column, click hold and drag there, drag it across, and now cell the column C will be slightly bigger. Keep your rows for a single patients entry. So this patient might be 50. She might be female and her admission temperature was 37.2 degrees. Hit enter. So, we have our variables down the columns. Here we have age. It is a continuous variable, it is numerical,it's ratio type. Here we have a continuous medical variable it's not ratio type, it's degrees Celsius. And here we have a nominal categorical variable. What if I wanted more ages. Well if I had your patients, I could type the next patients age which was 47. The next patient which was 52. But what if I just wanted random values? Let me show you. The first function I want to show you is just RAND, open, close parentheses. That stands for a random value. So let's go to E2, the cell. And for a function, we always type equals. Equals RAND, open, close parentheses, hit return and we see a random number was generated. It is a uniform distribution, in other words, every value is equally likely to be chosen and the range is from zero to one, for the range function. Let's try that again, moving to the cell down, equals and I don't have to do uppercase, I can just do RAND open, close parentheses, enter, another one. Look what happened to that first filler though, it changed. Now every time you type this, you're going to see something different and definitely different from what I see. Now every time you enter something in a different cell, these values are going to change and that can be slightly annoying. But I'll show you how to get rid of that. Now I mentioned I wanted more than just this and I want to type equals RAND every time. So I can just go to that last one, right bottom corner, you see the arrow change, the cursor that changes to a little cross. Click hold and drag, click hold and drag all the way down and each of the cells now is going to have equal RAND function in them. But as I say, I mentioned I changed this to 36.9, as soon as I hit enter, look what happens at the of corner all the RAND values, they change. So way to get rid of that is just to select all of them, click,hold on the first one, drag all the way down. I'm going to say copy and then see the little margin ends all the way around. They need to be copied, pasted somewhere, but I'm not going to paste them anywhere else. I'm going to paste them in place. So, I'm not moving anywhere else. I'm going to paste, but it's a special kind of paste called, paste values. If I hit paste values, these values are now locked in. They will not change. I click off of that selection, I hit the Escape key, and the margin ends disappear. Now I'm going to show you a different way to select random values. Remember these were uniform, from uniform distribution, from zero to one? And every decimal value in between N0, N1 is equally likely to be chosen. But what if I want these RAND values to come from a specific distribution? The one that I'm going to show you here is just the normal distribution. Normal distribution and we'll start with the standard normal distribution. In other words, we have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. That's very easy to do. I'm going to start with equal as four functions are NORM for NORM.INV. NORM.INV, there it is, I can click on it. And it says it wants three arguments. What we pass inside of the parentheses are called arguments. Probability argument, probability mean goes from zero to one. A mean and a standard deviation. Now probability going from zero to one, what does that tell you if I want random values. Quite correct, RAND, open, close parentheses. So give me a random one every time, and i went from a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one, so comma zero comma one. Watch out, the way your computer is set up, it might want semicolons and not just commas, so I'm going to hit return or enter or this little click mark and now if I click hold and drag all the way down, we're going to get random values but from a normal or standard normal distribution.So if a value is not equally likely to be chosen, values around zero are much more likely to be chosen than values are on negative one, negative two, negative three, or plus one, plus two, plus three. Now I can do all sorts of things, I can also say equals NORM dot INV and I'm selecting a day, I want a random probability and let's say I want a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of ten. Now, we're going to get values that are a bit different, a different mean and a different standard deviation. And that's a very easy and quick way for you to generate random values that follow a certain distribution.