Business Analysis with Microsoft® Excel, Second Edition

Chapter 9. Forecasting and Projections

In business, you often use forecasting to project sales, to estimate what future revenues will be on the basis of past history. This puts you in a position to estimate other quantities, 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 models that can incorporate your current conditions and forecast what's likely to happen next.

This might sound a bit like reading Tarot cards, but it's not. Consider sunspots. There's a fairly well-known 11-year cycle during which sunspot activity waxes and ...