Business Analysis: Microsoft® Excel 2010

9. Forecasting and Projections

IN THIS CHAPTER

Making Sure You Have a Useful Baseline 208

Moving Average Forecasts 210

Forecasting with Excel’s Regression Functions 216

Forecasting with Excel’s Smoothing Functions 225

Using the Box-Jenkins ARIMA Approach: When Excel’s Built-In Functions Won’t Do 234

In business, you often use forecasting to project sales, a process which involves estimating future revenues based on past history. This puts you in a position to make estimates of other resources, such as cost allocations and staffing, that you need to support the revenue stream.

The term forecasting, as used here, is the result of looking back at that historic data to investigate how what happened previously determined what happened subsequently. ...