Excel's crystal ball

By Neil Shorney, Director, Naturally Sales Ltd. Did you know that you can use Excel to gaze into the future...? If you only have partial data for a time period (say, for example, sales data part-way through the year), Excel can predict the rest of the period based on historical results. To do this, select data for the full period, including blank cells for that data which doesn't yet exist. Then create a 2D chart, and on the Layout contextual tab, select Trendlines to predict the future. Note this only works with 2D column or line graphs. We look at predicting future results more accurately in Advanced Microsoft Excel.