Chapter 23 -- Analyzing Business Data

Chapter 23

Running a successful business requires many important skills. One of your best management tools is the capacity to build what-if models to help you plan for the future. How many $1.75 coffees do you need to sell to gross $30,000? What will happen to your bottom line if you lower the price of caffè latte but increase advertising expenses? Fortunately, Microsoft Excel provides several useful planning tools to help you map out a robust future. In this chapter, you'll learn how to use the Goal Seek command to find an unknown value that produces a desired result, the Solver add-in to calculate an optimum solution based on several variables and constraints, and the Scenario Manager to create and evaluate a collection of what-if scenarios containing multiple input values.