Use Common-Age Excel Charts to Compare and Forecast Performance for the Same Number of...
In the early lives of new products or new stores, managers often are anxious to track and improve sales performance. To do so, it's...
Find Leading Indicators Using Automated Cross Correlations in Excel, Part 2
In Part 1 of this discussion about automated cross correlations, I explained how to set up the cross-correlation Data Table shown below, in columns...
Find Leading Indicators Using Automated Cross Correlations in Excel, Part 1
It all seems so simple...
To improve your forecasts of sales or other measures, you simply need to find leading indicators...measures that are highly correlated...
How to Reproduce Your Excel Work Across Many Categories, Part 2 of 3
As I explained in Part 1 of this series, Excel users often need to apply many instances of data to one model or forecast, list...
How to Reproduce Your Excel Work Across Many Categories, Part 1 of 3
A member of an Excel forum recently asked how to solve a problem that many Excel users face in various forms.
In his particular case,...
How to Create a Rolling Forecast of Seasonal Sales in Excel
The Excel chart below shows the typical saw-tooth pattern of seasonal sales.
Seasonal sales have about the same pattern every year, every week, or both. In...
How to Audit and Improve Excel Business Plans
A client, who's a business-finance consultant, recently was hired to improve the financial forecast for a major startup company. He recently sent me the...
Highlight Normal Results in Line Charts to Make Exceptional Results Stand Out
Line charts that show trends in performance are the most useful type of chart that management reports can contain.
All managers want good performance to...
How to Create Monte Carlo Models and Forecasts Using Excel Data Tables
(Download the workbook.)
(This is the second of two articles about normal distributions. The first article is, How to Return Random Numbers from a Normal...
How to Return Random Numbers from a Normal Distribution for Your Excel Forecasts
(This is the first of two articles about normal distributions. The second article is, How to Create Monte Carlo Models and Forecasts Using Excel Data...
Latest Articles
Getting Radical with Excel
It's time to think about Excel in a radical new way—when we use it to work with business or economic data.
It's time, in fact,...
How Fast Is Too Fast?
(Originally published in Inc Magazine.)
What typically tops the list of worries of the chief executive officers of fast growing companies? Financing that growth, according...
How to Smooth Data by Using the TREND Function
Years ago, I read that Prof. William S. Cleveland had suggested that data could be smoothed by calculating a centered trendline through adjacent data—a...
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