Business Analysis with Microsoft® Excel, Second Edition

Forecasting with Excel's Regression Functions

A simple moving average is a quick-and-dirty way to get a feel for the general trend of a time series, but you're likely to want more than that. If you worked through the examples for moving average forecasts, you probably noticed that they don't give you a projection more than one period beyond the final point in your baseline. You can get a projection further into the future by using one of Excel's regression functions.

Each of the regression methods estimates the relationship between the actual observations and some other variable. Applying one of these methods results in an equation whose coefficients you can use to make forecasts. The other variable is often a measure of when the observation ...