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I have looked into the Forcast & Trend formula but I cannot figure it out for the life of me.

I want to work out the trend 14 days from now.

I have a set of data:

A1 - A30 with dates
B1 - B30 with daily ticket count for the business.

I would like to make a result in another cell that would predict what the estimated total ticket count would be 14 days from now. I do not need all 14 days, just the 14th day.

If I was to try show you what the formula looks like in my head it would be:

=trend/forecast(B1:B30,14)

or

=Predict(B1:B30)*14

Unfortunately it is not as easy as that. How can I do this?

halfer
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mccarthy995
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  • This is your second question today about this although you have not answered questions we have had for you. Not sure how creating a new post is easier than answering the questions from the people here to help – urdearboy Aug 22 '19 at 18:44
  • Forecast is not something that can magically be done by a formula. Forecast is something that analysts do in various fields. When you forecast you need to create your own assumptions regarding how something may change in the future and then you apply those assumptions to your data. – Danny Papadopulos Aug 22 '19 at 18:52
  • ^ Correct. The below may give an output, but this is def not the best way. There tend to be many other factors that are important to consider and we don't have all that context. Is this tickets for a venue? If so, you have to consider that a max number of seats likely applies. You may also want to consider seasonality and many other things. – urdearboy Aug 22 '19 at 18:59

1 Answers1

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I think you want to use the Forecast function. The inputs you have do not match the correct format though.

FORECAST( x, known y's, known x's) where...

  1. x = the series (or date) you want to forecast
  2. known y's = historical tickets per day
  3. known x's = historical dates (or series)

The below example allows you to forecast tickets for any date (Forecasted Date) given the historical information (table on left). If your table is not formatted with actual dates, just create a series (first day = 1, second day = 2, etc.) and forecast that way.

Given the historical data, the forecasted tickets for Aug 28th (14 days after last known value) are 16.7

enter image description here

urdearboy
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  • Thanks for the answer. If you look at my last question, you will see the 'helpful responses' that lead me to create this second duplicate question. Within the first sentence of my question, I said that I looked at the formula and I couldn't make any sense of it. The first answer I got was for me to read up on the FORECAST function. I did, that's what lead me here in the first place At least you broke the formula down to the basics and I can now implement it. But don't be surprised that I created a new question. Its just easier to copy and paste the same thing and get nicer people to help – mccarthy995 Aug 23 '19 at 10:56
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    @mccarthy995: just quick heads up. Stack Overflow has something of a culture that takes some getting used to. Downvoting and closing are not examples of people being "not nice" - they are quality mechanisms that make this place somewhere where programmers want to come to. As with all groups, there will be some "not nice" people, but when you are new it is not ideal to make public pronouncements on a culture you're not acclimatised to yet. – halfer Aug 26 '19 at 10:08
  • I agree that it is easy to copy+paste a question, but be wary - if the questions are (nearly) identical that might result in one of them being closed, or people downvoting your questions because of the perception that you don't mind creating work for site curators. Either way, downvotes and close votes can apply a throttle (or a ban) to your future questions, so it is worth treading accordingly. – halfer Aug 26 '19 at 10:10