What If Sales Don’t Follow a Simple Trend?

Trendlines describe future sales well when you have a simple, linear increase or decrease. If your data doesn’t conform to this type of pattern, one of the following charting methods might work better.

First sales are up, then they’re down   To see the trend in all the spikes and dips, add a moving average trendline to your chart. This trendline smoothes out the fluctuations to show the overall growth pattern more clearly.

Sales are really taking off   If your sales are doubling or tripling, you’re seeing exponential growth. Use the GROWTH function instead of TREND to forecast this kind of expansion.

Next Steps

To	See
Include your forecasts in a report	Create a Business Report
Perform a complete statistical analysis of your sales figures	The Analysis ToolPak add-in. Also, see Analyze Data from an Experiment