What does Excel's RAND function really do

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brakeshoe

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I am trying to match a clients spreadsheet where they are using RAND() to generate values for the cumulative inverse standard normal distribution. According to Excel's built in documentation RAND returns values greater than or equal to zero and less than one. If this was true I believe I should eventually see a random number equal to zero be returned. If that happened then the function NORMSINV(0) would return a value of #NUM!. This has never happened after millions of trials. This leads me to believe that RAND is actually returning values between 0 and 1. Has anyone seen an Excel documentation that confirms this is the case?

Thanks
Dave
 

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