Business Analysis with Microsoft Excel, Third Edition

Chapter 9. Forecasting and Projections

IN THIS CHAPTER

Making Sure You Have a Useful Baseline 184

Moving Average Forecasts 185

Forecasting with Excel’s Regression Functions 192

Forecasting with Excel’s Smoothing Functions 199

Using the Box-Jenkins ARIMA Approach: When Excel’s Built-In Functions Won’t Do 206

In business, you often use forecasting to project sales, estimating future revenues on the basis of 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 historic data and figuring out how what came before determined what came after. That process leads to mathematical ...