how to find equation of a trendline in excel

This trendline type is often used in sciences, for example to visualize a human population growth or decline in wildlife populations. The exponential trendline is a curved line that illustrates a rise or fall in data values at an increasing rate, therefore the line is usually more curved at one side. And the R 2 value of 0.9855 indicates a pretty good fit of the estimated trendline values to the actual data. Typically, a linear trendline describes a continuous rise or fall over time.įor example, the following linear trendline shows a steady increase in sales over 6 months. The linear trend line is best to be used with linear data sets when the data points in a chart resemble a straight line. R-squared value measures the trendline reliability - the nearer R 2 is to 1, the better the trendline fits the data.īelow, you will find a brief description of each trendline type with chart examples.Trendline equation is a formula that finds a line that best fits the data points.

Additionally, Microsoft Excel allows displaying a trendline equation and R-squared value in a chart: Would love any direction on how to get to the finish line.When adding a trendline in Excel, you have 6 different options to choose from. I'd love to be able to decipher what tusharm is describing in this post to the point where I could replicate this myself. I've tried exponential smoothing, moving average, and even the forecast function, but all of them don't seem to produce the result that seems to make as much sense as the power curve. I need to forecast the rest of the values through 48 months. I have the one column representing decreasing transactions each month that look like this: The power curve trendline seems to have the closest R-square value (again still trying to learn what that is) to 1 and well, it just looks closer than any of the other trendlines.

Anyway, I am doing a lifetime value analysis and my data set shows a series of transactions starting off strong and steadily declining over time. I am cursed with desperately trying to catch up from not taking math or statistics in college. OK, I am trying to solve the exact same problem that chastst is, except I am dumber, well, a lot less smart.

How to find equation of a trendline in excel