Chapter 10. USEFUL DATA ANALYSIS TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

Perform What-If Analysis

When you use a formula or function, your purpose is often to find out how one thing influences another. When you use the IRR function, for example, you can find out how a change in the loan amount, payment amount, or payment date — or some combination of these factors — affects the interest received. You can type in different amounts and different payment dates to see how different scenarios affect the interest rate.

What-if analysis is a systematic way of finding out how a change in one or more variables affects a result. The Scenario Manager lets you vary one or more inputs into any formula or function to see how the result changes.

You can use the Scenario Manager two ...

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