Forecast sheet excel как

About this lesson

Generating forecast charts in Excel is only a few clicks away, resulting in a chart that you can customize and update later.

Quick reference

• 00:04
  The next visual that I’d like to add to my dashboard is a forecast of revenue,
• 00:10
  I’m gonna go right down here.
• 00:13
  Now you can build these manually in other versions of Excel if you’ve got
• 00:16
  enough data and wizardry behind it’s work out what you’re forecasts are.
• 00:20
  But in Excel 2016 it actually becomes really easy
• 00:23
  because they’ve given us a button to insert one of these things.
• 00:26
  Now this works for all versions of Excel 2016,
• 00:29
  you don’t have to be on subscription.
• 00:31
  And what you’ll need is some data that looks like this.
• 00:33
  Notice that I’ve got a monthly trend here that’s showing me my historical revenues.
• 00:38
  From 2015 all the way through to the end of December 31st 2017.
• 00:41
  So I’ve got three years of data here all grouped up on a monthly basis.
• 00:46
  In order to insert this revenue forecast chart,
• 00:49
  what I’m gonna do is I’m actually not going to the Insert tab.
• 00:52
  There’s no revenue forecast chart on here, it’s on the Data tab.
• 00:55
  And if I go here it’s called Forecast Sheet, and
• 00:58
  when I click on it it gives me something that looks like this.
• 01:03
  Now this actually doesn’t look too bad,
• 01:05
  it gives me a nice little run that says here’s what my historical revenues were.
• 01:09
  And this is what we predict your future ones will be.
• 01:10
  And then it’s got these confidence boundaries that say would you like to
• 01:14
  have, or it will give me something that says.
• 01:17
  If all things remain equal we’re pretty sure that with
• 01:19
  a 95% confidence ratio that your data will fall between the top and
• 01:23
  bottom line, but ideally around the middle.
• 01:26
  It gives me the ability to control how far I want my forecast to go, so one year,
• 01:31
  I can go even further if I want.
• 01:32
  But you’ll see that as cool as this looks, there are some challenges here.
• 01:36
  When I open this up, you’ll notice my forecast starts at this particular area.
• 01:41
  It’s got the Confidence Interval,
• 01:42
  if I turn it off, those extra lines will go away.
• 01:46
  If I put it back on, would bring it back and I can dial this up or down.
• 01:50
  The challenge that I have though is that it has automatically detected that
• 01:54
  the Seasonality of my business runs in 6 months cycles.
• 01:58
  And it doesn’t, for this particular data set, it actually runs with a year.
• 02:01
  So I need to change this, now I can type this, but I want you to show or see how as
• 02:06
  I dial this up and down, it will actually change the way the chart looks.
• 02:12
  Once we get to 12 months, you’ll notice that this pattern in orange here.
• 02:16
  Is actually very similar to the pattern that I have for the first 12 month period,
• 02:19
  which goes to about here.
• 02:21
  And then the next 12 month period, which goes to about here.
• 02:23
  And then our third year is very jagged, but it actually takes that and says.
• 02:26
  Well, let’s smooth it out and see what actually ends up happening here.
• 02:30
  It looks like we’ve got a pretty good prediction of what might happen.
• 02:34
  As well as confidence interval that we can play with.
• 02:37
  So I could go and I could dial this down,
• 02:39
  and you’ll see that at this point the lines become closer together.
• 02:43
  If I go and dial it back up, the lines come further apart because it wants us to
• 02:46
  actually fit, or say that the data’s gonna be within this range most likely.
• 02:52
  When I build this, I have the ability also to fill in missing points.
• 02:55
  So if there’s something missing, we can interpolate the data.
• 02:57
  We can do some different things in this particular area, put in Zeroes instead.
• 03:01
  We can aggregate duplicates with some different functions as well.
• 03:04
  We can also, when we create our chart, include some Forecast Statistics.
• 03:10
  Let’s click Create,
• 03:11
  and what you’ll see is that we actually get a new worksheet all together.
• 03:16
  So our forecast data here is not linked into this new worksheet,
• 03:19
  although we could certainly link it here if we wanted to do that.
• 03:24
  Behind the chart, here are our summary statistics, and we can modify those and
• 03:28
  they will feed into the chart as well.
• 03:31
  This chart is obviously missing something important, a title.
• 03:34
  So let’s go Add a Chart Element, a Chart Title, Above the Chart, and
• 03:38
  we’ll call this guy here something like Revenue Forecast.
• 03:44
  There we are, so its just a chart like any other, we can modify it.
• 03:48
  Change things, take things away, add things to it, and what not.
• 03:52
  The key part around this chart thought is really kind of nice.
• 03:55
  Is that we actually have the ability to take a look back at the raw data that
• 03:59
  made this up.
• 04:00
  And as we start looking through it,
• 04:02
  you’ll see that the table that feeds this actually uses a bunch of formulas.
• 04:06
  It’s hard coded data, and my Revenue areas, the very first data point for
• 04:11
  our Forecast is hard-coded.
• 04:13
  But after this it all goes into used FORECAST.ETS, and
• 04:16
  confidence interval functions and what not.
• 04:19
  In order to actually provide some statistical validity to what’s
• 04:22
  going on here.
• 04:23
  Why is this so important?
• 04:24
  Well, when you’re building something, you should always be looking at your data,
• 04:29
  of course.
• 04:30
  And maybe we figure out with this thing as we look through it and we say,
• 04:33
  February’s sales that are being used in this forecast, these were abnormally high.
• 04:38
  If I look at February last year,
• 04:40
  it was around $8,600, I’m pretty sure that this one isn’t gonna be that big.
• 04:44
  So I don’t really wanna influencing the system in that way, so
• 04:47
  why don’t I go back and modify that, and say let’s soften this.
• 04:52
  And it’ll change the chart, maybe you don’t wanna do it there, maybe say,
• 04:55
  well you know what, that’s not ideal.
• 04:57
  Maybe I want to go down and
• 04:59
  I actually want to play around with these values that are down here.
• 05:03
  And I’m saying, how about this March value here?
• 05:06
  I don’t want it to be in this range, for whatever reason I’ve got some good intel
• 05:10
  that says this one should end up in this particular area.
• 05:13
  I can override this value, and it will change the chart as well.
• 05:16
  So this is kind of a nice thing, is that we can play with this forecast.
• 05:19
  We’re not stuck with what we have, we can link formulas into it.
• 05:22
  We can drive it dynamically from other pieces within our workbook which is
• 05:26
  kind of cool.
• 05:27
  Once we’re happy with it, we can grab it, Control+C.
• 05:32
  We can go over to our Dashboard worksheet.
• 05:38
  We can Paste it, and then, of course like usual, hold down our Alt key.
• 05:42
  And resize it to make sure everything is in the top left hand corner of the range
• 05:45
  we wanna put it in.
• 05:48
  And it fits quite nicely, so
• 05:50
  that’s how we can use Excel 2016 to add a Forecast chart into our data set as well.