Office 2010 Made Simple

Solving Business Problems with Scenarios and Goal Seek

In this section, I'll show you how to use two tools for solving business problems:

• Scenarios. Scenarios give you an easy way to experiment with different values without changing the existing data in your worksheet.
• Goal Seek. Goal Seek computes the change you need to make to one value in order to make another cell's value reach your target value—working backward from your goal, as it were.

Examining Different Scenarios in a Worksheet

Often, when you've built a worksheet, you'll want to experiment with different data in it. Instead of changing the actual figures in the worksheet itself, you can use Excel's scenarios, which give you a way to assign multiple values to each key cell and then ...