Last week, I showed you how to perform a simple percent of sales forecast. It is a quick method for forecasting but assumes you will increase or decrease your metric by the same percentage every month. It also relies on you to guess how much of a change you expect.

Instead of guessing what the percentage change will be in the future, why not use your historical data?

A linear regression forecast fits a trend line to your historical data, projecting to unknown periods in the future. The bast part is, Excel has a simple formula built-in to do this for you.

Learn to use linear forecasting in Excel in this week’s video! (4:22)