Over in our sister newsletter, Office for Mere Mortals, Michael Barden has done a neat article on the RAND() function in Excel.

Random numbers are more widely used in worksheets than many people might think.  They can be used for complex mathematical calculations and also for more mundane purposes.

For example, a worksheet can be used to randomly pick staff for testing (drugs etc) or simply emulating the roll of a dice.

In all cases it's important that the random number generator is as random and even distributed as possible.

In the 'dice' example you need to be assured that there's the same chance of each digit 1 to 6 appearing on each 'roll' of the calculation.   If the random number function is faulty, one number might appear more or less often than others.

The Excel 2003 RAND() function is more than enough for regular use, despite a false start mentioned in Michael's article.

If you need a better random number generator then look at Zrandom which boasts a more complex random number generator plus various Excel functions which will make sense to people who were awake during maths classes (unlike me!).