The world in which your business operates is constantly changing. Capturing the state of your business once a month may not reflect the reality of your situation. Fortunately, in Microsoft Excel you can add fitted curves and trendlines to help you track gradual changes in your business conditions rather than only large shifts.

Step 1

Open an existing Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing the data you wish to graph and fit to a curve, or create a new spreadsheet and enter your data.

Step 2

Open the "Insert" tab and select "Chart" to create a chart containing the individual data point on which you will plot the fitted curve. Common formats include the XY Scatterplot, Column and Area.

Step 3

Select the data columns in your spreadsheet corresponding to the X (dependent) and Y (independent) values of the data. The X-axis commonly corresponds to time and the Y-axis commonly corresponds to a value such as sales, cost, profit or revenue.

Step 4

Open the "Chart" menu and select "Add Trendline." This will plot a line showing the trend of the data on the graph calculated using a moving average or similar algorithm. This helps you see how the data evolves over time without the effort and constraint required to fit the data to a statistical model. Select and then right-click on the trendline to change the format.

Step 5

Select the "Display equation on chart" option under the Fit Trendline dialog box to change the model used to calculate the trendline. You can choose from lineal, exponential, logarithmic and polynomial models to match your data. Least-squares curve fitting is used to calculate the optimal model fit to the data.


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