Excel predictive analytics for serious data crunchers

The movie Moneyball made predictive analytics famous: Now you can apply the same techniques to help your business win. You don t need multimillion-dollar software: All the tools you need are available in Microsoft Excel, and all the knowledge and skills are right here, in this book

Microsoft Excel MVP Conrad Carlberg shows you how to use Excel predictive analytics to solve real-world problems in areas ranging from sales and marketing to operations. Carlberg offers unprecedented insight into building powerful, credible, and reliable forecasts, showing how to gain deep insights from Excel that would be difficult to uncover with costly tools such as SAS or SPSS.

You ll get an extensive collection of downloadable Excel workbooks you can easily adapt to your own unique requirements, plus VBA code much of it open-source to streamline several of this book s most complex techniques.

Step by step, you ll build on Excel skills you already have, learning advanced techniques that can help you increase revenue, reduce costs, and improve productivity. By mastering predictive analytics, you ll gain a powerful competitive advantage for your company and yourself.

Learn both the how and why of using data to make better tactical decisions

Choose the right analytics technique for each problem

Use Excel to capture live real-time data from diverse sources, including third-party websites

Use logistic regression to predict behaviors such as will buy versus won t buy

Distinguish random data bounces from real, fundamental changes

Forecast time series with smoothing and regression

Construct more accurate predictions by using Solver to find maximum likelihood estimates

Manage huge numbers of variables and enormous datasets with principal components analysis and Varimax factor rotation

Apply ARIMA (Box-Jenkins) techniques to build better forecasts and understand their meaning

Predictive Analytics Microsoft Excel 1st Edition

Predictive Analytics Microsoft Excel 1st Edition