What is the What-If Analysis in Excel? Is it important for me to know?

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I use Goal Seek within the What-If Analysis almost every day, and I use Data Tables often as well. Yes, you can do these by hand, but in my experience this functionality has considerable reduced the amount of time spent on various analyses.

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As always, it depends.

- are you a politician or a US senate analyst? Naah

- are you a consultant that works with market analysis, either financial or strategic? Maybe*

- are you an excel developer? Yes

* What-if analysis can be done, relatively easy, by hand

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The goal seek function is super useful https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2sNOBp0O1ks

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It depends, what are you trying to do. The data and target predicts what’s important.

The revenue a company generates is a function of price and volume. Without constraints, the revenue a company can generate is infinite. However, once constraints are considered (such as machine hours, people hours, or supply/demand considerations) an optimum can be identified that maximizes revenue given the constraints. Similarly, we could have an objective to maximize profit (or minimize costs) subject to constraints.

What-If Analysis uses constraints to set a target cell to some objective. The constraints, target cell, and objectives are set within the Analysis window. Goal Seek is a type of What-If Analysis where a target cell is set to some user-identified number by changing a single user-identified cell. Goal Seek only allows the user to set three variables whereas What-If Analysis can have many constraints. Goal Seek is helpful to quickly determine breakeven.

Hope this helps.

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