Excel Sales Forecasting For Dummies (eBook)

Conrad Carlberg is a nationally recognized expert in quantitative analysis, data analysis, and management applications such as Microsoft Excel, SAS, and Oracle. He has been a sales engineer and also worked in product marketing. Conrad has written numerous books on Excel and other Microsoft Office applications. He holds a PhD in statistics.

Introduction 1

Part 1: Understanding Sales Forecasting and How Excel Can Help 5

Chapter 1: A Forecasting Overview 7

Chapter 2: Forecasting: The Basic Issues 23

Chapter 3: Understanding Baselines 41

Chapter 4: Predicting the Future: Why Forecasting Works 53

Part 2: Organizing the Data 69

Chapter 5: Choosing Your Data: How to Get a Good Baseline 71

Chapter 6: Setting Up Tables in Excel 87

Chapter 7: Working with Tables in Excel 103

Part 3: Making a Basic Forecast 119

Chapter 8: Summarizing Sales Data with Pivot Tables 121

Chapter 9: Charting Your Baseline: It's a Good Idea 141

Chapter 10: Forecasting with Excel's Data Analysis Add-in 159

Chapter 11: Basing Forecasts on Regression 173

Part 4: Making Advanced Forecasts 189

Chapter 12: Entering the Formulas Yourself 191

Chapter 13: Using Moving Averages 219

Chapter 14: Changing Horses: From Moving Averages to Smoothing 237

Chapter 15: Smoothing: How You Profit from Your Mistakes 259

Chapter 16: Fine-Tuning a Regression Forecast 285

Chapter 17: Managing Trends 311

Chapter 18: Same Time Last Year: Forecasting Seasonal Sales 329

Part 5: The Part of Tens 349

Chapter 19: Ten Fun Facts to Know and Tell about Array Formulas 351

Chapter 20: The Ten Best Excel Tools 363

Index 373