Oh Wise and powerful Teaming Millions: Percentages question

Man do I feel stupid, and whenever I feel stupid I know where to come to help alliviate myself of this wretched feeling.

I’m working in excell and I have a list of numbers that equal 200:

15.96025695
1
2
150.5746404
9.312442396
4.011059908
2
15.14160034

The percentages of each number are therefore:

0.079801285
0.005
0.01
0.752873202
0.046562212
0.0200553
0.01
0.075708002
I need to lower the percentage of the fourth number from 75% to %66 AND have the remaining percentages still add up to 100%.

So this is where I am:

???
???
???
0.66
???
???
???
???

Not very good. How do I determine what the percentages for the other numbers should be? I know the answer is very simple, but I’m drawing a blank. PS: this is not homework!

Do you mean you want the “extra” spread evenly among the remaining numbers?

Then is would just involve adding 1.3% to the other numbers. (1.3% is the 9% you are removing from the 75% to get to 66% divided among the other 7 values)

If you want to change only the fourth number, while leaving all the other numbers the same, so that the fourth number is now 66% of the total instead of 75% (and the new total, of course, will no longer be 200), the fourth number needs to be 95.94334509.

Here’s how I got that:
Call the fourth number x. The other numbers add up to 49.42535959, so the total will be x + 49.42535959.
You want the fourth number to be 66% of the total: this means you want x = .66(x + 49.42535959).

Solving this for x yields x = 95.94334509.

First, let me point out that the numbers you posted aren’t percentages. They’re percentages divided by 100, so they range from 0.0-1.0, not 0-100.

The question you ask is sort of up to interpretation. As I understand it, you should do the following:
When you change 150.5746404 to be 66% of the total, 200, you get 132. Now that means that the rest of the numbers now take up 34%, not 25%. That means you’ll want to increase each number by a factor of 34/25, or 1.36

So you’ll get

1.36 * 15.96025695
1.36
2.72
134 (66 percent of total)
1.36 * 9.312442396
1.36 * 4.011059908
2.72
1.36 * 15.14160034