joeb,
Knowing exactly what is meant by Monte Carlo simulation, I have trouble guessing what the heck you are talking about in regards to powder measures.   

Depending what's involved, I might do it, but for what and why I need some more explanation.

Brent

I'm not at all sure what the point is of doing this, but if you want to draw from a given Normal distribution, the following equation will produce a normally distributed value with mean = X and  Standard Deviation = S

AND()-6)*X+S

You can put this into an excel sheet and plug away to your heart's content.  The MIN and MAX functions will give you the extreme spread if this is what you want, they extreme spread is a piss pour indication of anything - we have discussed this many times before.  

Also, to jump from error in volumetric powder measurement to variation in velocity using a regression equation of powder vs. velocity is a bit misleading.  The regress itself is subject to error, so now you have two error processes whose variances are additive.  Thus, your predictions of the extreme spread in velocities will be too small.

Finally, none of this is worth anything unless you know how extreme spread in velocity affects precision at a given distance.  This introduces a third error function with another additive variance component, but it is the only value which might really be of importance - again with caveats about the  inadequacy of extreme spread of any measure.

BTW, where is the CBA site?  I've never even seen it.

Brent

Joe,
I'm not fighting, but I'm also not going to spend a whole lot of time writing code to do something that I know to be statistically misguided.

I've spent a lot  - a whole  lot - of time and sweat on writing code and spreadsheets and webpages on statistical methodologies and gotten pretty well reamed all across the net for my troubles.  Mostly by people that make arguments that are the equivalent of "the earth is flat" or "evolution is just a theory".  If you think you're tired, well, I hear ya, and I'm not going to dive into doing something that I know is going to draw a pile of heat and be misguided to boot.  I gave you enough code that you can hack a spreadsheet to do this if you really want.  But I'm not going to work up a formal program for the whole shootin' match.   

Brent

Cat - Congratulations on the degrees.  Indeed, you know that they are rather "serious" about stats around here.  However were they to see anything so simplistic as what I have suggested, I'd be laughed off the campus.  I serve on an occasional Stats graduate committee, so I help me keep this under wraps...

Brent

Jeroen Hogema of The Netherlands came through again, I've got it.
Thanks;
joe b.