Note: In this blog post, I have discussed the concept of a bell curve and how to create it in Excel.
For example, in case a team is full of high performers, when evaluated on a curve, despite being a high performer, someone can get an average rating as he/she was in the middle of the curve. This kind of bell curve can be used to identify where a data point lies in the chart.
Note that when you have a low standard deviation, you get a packed slim bell curve, and when you have a high standard deviation, the bell curve is wide and covers more area on the chart. Now you can change the chart title and adjust the axis if you need. This will give you a bell curve in Excel.
In the cell below it enter 36 and create a series from 35 to 95 (where 95 is Mean + 3* Standard Deviation).This value can be calculated using Mean – 3* Standard Deviation (65-3*10).
Here are the steps to create a bell curve for this dataset: (You can calculate the mean using the AVERAGE function in Excel and Standard Deviation using the STDEV.P function). The mean score of the class is 65 and the standard deviation is 10. Let’s take an example of a class of students that have been scored in an exam. Now let’s see how to create a bell curve in Excel.