Profit Margin Trend

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HI

I need to work out the projected future profit margin based on the
trend of the previous period of days in the month.

For instance

Day 1 - 25.60%
Day 2 - 24.50%
Day 3 - 26.90%
Day 4 - 23.20%
Day 5 - 21.00%

What would be the trend for the rest of the month based on the above.
Please advise the best function/formule to calculate this.

Thanks

VC

 

[Guest]

Take a look at the TREND function. equally, you could do a line plot and add
the trend line plus display the equation of that line (of form y=Mx+c).

HTH

 

[Lonnie M.]

Hi, just to add to Toppers advice, if you have the analysis tool pack
add-in installed then you can use some of the tools included with it.
Look in the tools menu for 'Data Analysis'. It has exponential
smoothing and some other useful forecasting tools. If this forecasting
is vital, that is worth some investment of time, you may want to look
into something like double exponential smoothing. See the links below:

Single Exponential Smoothing:
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/pmc/section4/pmc431.htm

Double Exponential Smoothing:
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/pmc/section4/pmc433.htm

HTH--Lonnie M.