Product Description

When they first told you that forecasting sales would be part of your job, did you feel just the tiniest bit of panic? Did you momentarily consider consulting the Yellow Pages for listings of “Psychics” or “Tea Leaf Readers”? Well, fear not. Excel Sales Forecasting For Dummies can help you predict the future without incense or a crystal ball.

Excel Sales Forecasting For Dummies shows you how to use the number one workbook program, Microsoft Excel, to predict trends and future sales based on something not quite so ethereal—numbers. You use data about the past to forecast the future. Excel provides all sorts of tools to help you do that, and this book shows you how to use them.

From recognizing why forecasting is a good idea to making sense of exponential smoothing, Excel Sales Forecasting For Dummies has you covered. If you have a basic grasp of how to use Excel, you’ll be ready to discover how to

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #161847 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 408 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780764575938
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From the Back Cover
Here's the fun and easy way® to predict the future!

Organize sales data, chart a baseline, forecast trends, and more with Excel

Do you succumb to sweaty palms the moment someone mentions sales predictions? This book is loaded with confidence-boosters! It shows you how to use the many tools Excel provides to arrange your past data, set up lists and pivot tables, use Excel's Analysis ToolPak, and become a forecaster par excellence — even if you're math-challenged.

Discover how to

• Choose the right forecasting method
• Find relationships in your data
• Filter lists or turn them into charts
• Summarize data with pivot tables
• Use moving averages
• Predict seasonal sales

About the Author
Conrad Carlberg is the author of more than ten books about Microsoft Excel. As a multi-time recipient of Microsoft’s MVP designation for Excel, he is a nationally recognized expert on that application.
Carlberg’s Ph.D. in statistics involves work in forecasting, as does his work in telecommunications and the health-care industry. He used the techniques in this book to reduce a crushing $24 million inventory owned by a Baby Bell to under $10 million in 18 months. The carrying costs for $24 million in equipment are significant. The point: This forecasting stuff works.
As preparation for starting his consultancy, Carlberg spent two years as a sales engineer for a Fortune 500 company.

Customer Reviews

A Unique and Valuable Book
I read the book from cover to cover and was thoroughly enlightened. From a content perspective, the book is first rate. Carlberg not only explains how to forecast, but he also clarifies the pros and cons of the various methods, explains how to reduce forecasting error, and offers excellent insight into regression and the other statistics involved in making and evaluating a forecast.

Carlberg also masterfully integrates theory with practice by clearly explaining how to best utilize Excel for forecasting. I consider myself a very advanced user of Excel, but nevertheless benefited from Carlberg's sophisticated understanding of Excel. He provides an excellent overview of the pros, cons, and pitfalls of using the Analysis Toolpak vs. spreadsheet modeling, and offers a number of arcane Excel tips that I haven't found elsewhere. For example, despite years of Excel experience, I never understood (or, more accurately, noticed) the difference between a `Category Axis' and a `Value Axis' in an Excel chart.

I almost gave Excel Sales Forecasting four stars, for one important reason: The book was poorly organized. The main topics in the book - moving averages, exponential smoothing, and regression - were broken up into too many pieces, such that each topic was covered multiple times with a lot of unnecessary repetition. I realize this is, to some extent, the nature of Dummies books, which are not necessarily meant to be read cover-to-cover. But as a result, I often found myself needlessly re-reading material several times and, conversely, often had to flip back several chapters because I had forgotten some of the nuances of one of the methods by the time I got to a more advanced section. Having just finished the book, I still feel like I need to review it one more time, by topic, to put all the `pieces' back together in my mind.

With the exception of the final rant above, the book is outstanding and provides an insightful introduction to someone like myself who knew nothing of forecasting.

I'm not one to normally quote old sayings, but this book brought to mind the Chinese (Confucius) proverb: "I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand." Learning forecasting via Excel helped strengthen my understanding. The author and Wiley (the publisher) deserve a lot of credit for producing this unique and valuable book.

A book I've needed for a long time
I know that Dummies books are supposed to be easygoing and offer a lighter tone than most, so I was surprised to see this topic getting the Dummies treatment. I'm glad to report that it works. Excel Sales Forecasting is very reader-friendly, and it demystifies intimidating concepts like "exponential smoothing" and "mutiple regression." I've done a lot of numeric analysis but not much forecasting, mainly because the available texts are so dense and inpenetrable. No more! This book provides the material I need to understand, clearly and with useful detail and examples. It covers the basics and also dips into some more advanced topics. It considers not just the number crunching aspects, but also the business context that you're forecasting into. And it's fun to read! We dummies have a secret: we're smart enough to get books written for us that don't make our eyes glaze over. This one makes the grade.

If "For Dummies" Means Comprehensible...
If "For Dummies" means, clear, comprehensible, well illustrated, and fun to read to boot, then "Excel Sales Forecasting for Dummies" is true to its name. When you put together a guide to one of the most powerful and useful pieces of software in any company's arsenal with the genius of Conrad Carlberg to lead even the neophyte through the intracacies of sales forecasting, the combination is downright unbeatable. Carlberg has won awards for a string of some of the best "how-to" books on EXCEL and Microsoft Office. This new one gets my personal award for "best EXCEL guide of the year."