Excel 2000 in a Nutshell

Name

FORECAST

Synopsis

Use FORECAST to predict a future result for a specified value based upon the known values and corresponding results. For example, you can predict the number of sales this month based upon the inventory and corresponding sales for the previous six months.

Note

This type of prediction is only valid if there is a linear trend and should be used with caution.

To Calculate

=FORECAST(X, Known_Y's, Known_X's))

All three arguments are required for this function.

X

This argument must be a numeric value for which you want to predict the future value.

Example

Figure 15-15 illustrates how FORECAST is use to predict the number of sales for the month of December based upon the sales and inventory for the previous months of the year.

Figure 15-15. FORECAST uses the correlation between the known X and Y values to predict a future Y value