Data Science for Business Users

Forecasting Part 1.1 — Create Forecast using Excel

This tutorial was created to democratize data science for business users (i.e., minimize usage of advanced mathematics topics) and alleviate personal frustration we have experienced on following tutorials and struggling to apply that same tutorial for our needs. In light of this, our mission is as follows:

• Provide practical application of data science tasks with minimal usage of advanced mathematical topics
• Only use a full set of data, which are similar to data we see in business environment and that are publicly available in a tutorial, instead of using simple data or snippets of data used by many tutorials
• Clearly state the prerequisites at beginning of the tutorial. We will try to provide additional information on those prerequisites
• Provide both written tutorial and video tutorial on each topic to ensure all steps are easy to follow and clearly illustrated

1. Description

This is part one of series on how to create a forecast, using one of the most widely used data science tool — Excel. If you are surprised by this statement, then we refer you to www.kdnuggets.com (one of the most widely followed blog for data science). They conduct annual poll on tools and according to the poll, Excel is one of the most widely used tool by data scientists…