Chapter 10
Tracking Trends and Making Forecasts
IN THIS CHAPTER
Charting the overall trend of a set of values
Calculating values that show how data is trending
Charting historical data into future periods
Calculating future values given some historical data
Charting exponential, logarithmic, power, and polynomial trends, what they are
When you’re analyzing data, it certainly helps to run basic calculations such as sum and average and to summarize the data either by using Excel’s database functions or, even better, by constructing a PivotTable or PivotChart. It’s all good. However, as useful as these tools are, they can’t answer one seemingly fundamental question: Given some historical data — it could be profits or sales or expenses or defects or customer complaints — what’s the overall direction of that data? Are profits going up? Are defects going down? Are sales cyclical (say, down in the winter but up in the summer)? Answering these types of questions falls under the heading of ...
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