Excel at predicting sales and forecasting trends using Microsoft Excel

If you're a sales or marketing professional, you know that forecasting sales is one of the biggest challenges you face on the job. Unlike other books on the subject, Excel Sales Forecasting For Dummies, 2^nd Edition leaves arcane business school terms and complex algebraic equations at the door, focusing instead on what you can do right now to utilize the world's most popular spreadsheet program to produce forecasts you can rely on.

Loaded with confidence boosters for anyone who succumbs to sweaty palms when sales predictions are mentioned, this trusted guide show you how to use the many tools Excel provides to arrange your past data, set up lists and pivot tables, use moving averages, and so much more. Before you know it, you'll become a forecaster par excellence--even if numbers aren't your jam.

• Choose the right forecasting method
• Find relationships in your data
• Predict seasonal sales
• Filter lists or turn them into charts

Consider this guide your crystal ball--and start predicting the future with confidence and ease

USE EXCEL'S STATISTICAL TOOLS TO TRANSFORM YOUR DATA INTO KNOWLEDGE

Nationally recognized Excel expert Conrad Carlberg shows you how to use Excel 2016 to perform core statistical tasks every business professional, student, and researcher should master. Using real-world examples and downloadable workbooks, Carlberg helps you choose the right technique for each problem and get the most out of Excel's statistical features. Along the way, he clarifies confusing statistical terminology and helps you avoid common mistakes.

You'll learn how to use correlation and regression, analyze variance and covariance, and test statistical hypotheses using the normal, binomial, t, and F distributions. To help you make accurate inferences based on samples from a population, Carlberg offers insightful coverage of crucial topics ranging from experimental design to the statistical power of F tests. Updated for Excel 2016, this guide covers both modern consistency functions and legacy compatibility functions.

Becoming an expert with Excel statistics has never been easier In this book, you'll find crystal-clear instructions, insider insights, and complete step-by-step guidance.

• Master Excel's most useful descriptive and inferential statistical tools
• Understand how values cluster together or disperse, and how variables move or classify jointly
• Tell the truth with statistics--and recognize when others don't
• Infer a population's characteristics from a sample's frequency distribution
• Explore correlation and regression to learn how variables move in tandem
• Use Excel consistency functions such as STDEV.S( ) and STDEV.P( )
• Test differences between two means using z tests, t tests, and Excel's Data Analysis Add-in
• Identify skewed distributions using Excel's new built-in box-and-whisker plots and histograms
• Evaluate statistical power and control risk
• Explore how randomized block and split plot designs alter the derivation of F-ratios
• Use coded multiple regression analysis to perform ANOVA with unbalanced factorial designs
• Analyze covariance with ANCOVA, and properly use multiple covariance
• Take advantage of Recommended PivotTables, Quick Analysis, and other Excel 2016 shortcuts

Gain Deeper Insights, Make Smarter Decisions, and Earn More Profits

It's time to put the full power of Excel quantitative analysis behind your management decisions!

Business analysis expert Conrad Carlberg shows you how to use Excel to perform core financial tasks all managers and entrepreneurs need to master: analyzing statements, planning and controlling company finances, making investment decisions, and managing sales and marketing. Carlberg helps you make the most of Excel's tools and features in everything from business case development to cash flow analysis.

Becoming an Excel expert has never been easier. You'll find crystal-clear instructions, real-world examples, insider insights, step-by-step projects, and much more. It's all complemented by extensive web-based resources, from sample journals and ledgers to business forecasting tools.

- Get more insight from income statements and balance sheets

- Manage current assets and value inventories

- Summarize transactions from journal to balance sheet

- Analyze working capital, cash flow, statements, and ratios

- Optimize budgeting and planning cycles

- Make more accurate and useful forecasts and projections

- Measure product or service quality

- Plan investments, set decision criteria, and perform sensitivity analyses

- Analyze profits, pricing, costs, contributions, and margins

- Make better decisions in uncertain conditions

- Understand and maximize the value of fixed assets

- Efficiently import and export business data

- Use Excel and Power BI to analyze data from QuickBooks or other sources

Leverage the full power of Bayesian analysis for competitive advantage

Bayesian methods can solve problems you can't reliably handle any other way. Building on your existing Excel analytics skills and experience, Microsoft Excel MVP Conrad Carlberg helps you make the most of Excel's Bayesian capabilities and move toward R to do even more.

Step by step, with real-world examples, Carlberg shows you how to use Bayesian analytics to solve a wide array of real problems. Carlberg clarifies terminology that often bewilders analysts, and offers sample R code to take advantage of the rethinking package in R and its gateway to Stan.

As you incorporate these Bayesian approaches into your analytical toolbox, you'll build a powerful competitive advantage for your organization--and yourself.

• Explore key ideas and strategies that underlie Bayesian analysis
• Distinguish prior, likelihood, and posterior distributions, and compare algorithms for driving sampling inputs
• Use grid approximation to solve simple univariate problems, and understand its limits as parameters increase
• Perform complex simulations and regressions with quadratic approximation and Richard McElreath's quap function
• Manage text values as if they were numeric
• Learn today's gold-standard Bayesian sampling technique: Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)
• Use MCMC to optimize execution speed in high-complexity problems
• Discover when frequentist methods fail and Bayesian methods are essential--and when to use both in tandem

This is today's most complete guide to regression analysis with Microsoft(R) Excel for any business analytics or research task. Drawing on 25 years of advanced statistical experience, Microsoft MVP Conrad Carlberg shows how to use Excel's regression-related worksheet functions to perform a wide spectrum of practical analyses.

Carlberg clearly explains all the theory you'll need to avoid mistakes, understand what your regressions are really doing, and evaluate analyses performed by others. From simple correlations and t-tests through multiple analysis of covariance, Carlberg offers hands-on, step-by-step walkthroughs using meaningful examples.

He discusses the consequences of using each option and argument, points out idiosyncrasies and controversies associated with Excel's regression functions, and shows how to use them reliably in fields ranging from medical research to financial analysis to operations.

You don't need expensive software or a doctorate in statistics to work with regression analyses. Microsoft Excel has all the tools you need--and this book has all the knowledge!

• Understand what regression analysis can and can't do, and why
• Master regression-based functions built into all recent versions of Excel
• Work with correlation and simple regression
• Make the most of Excel's improved LINEST() function
• Plan and perform multiple regression
• Distinguish the assumptions that matter from the ones that don't
• Extend your analysis options by using regression instead of traditional analysis of variance
• Add covariates to your analysis to reduce bias and increase statistical power