Predictive Analytics: Microsoft Excel

by Conrad Carlberg

Excel predictive analytics for serious data crunchers! The movie Moneyball made predictive analytics Now you can apply the same techniques to help your business win. You don’t need multimillion-dollar 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

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Technology

304 pages, Paperback

First published June 26, 2012

Reviews

[Blakely · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good reference book. It does require some knowledge of statistics for the more advanced functions described.

On another, somewhat related, note.... I really hope that all of the steps described here work on a Mac. If you are a serious Excel user I highly recommend sticking with a PC computer. Many of the more advanced functions don't work with the Mac version of Excel or come out years later and the menus are laid out differently so Excel tutorials based on Excel for PCs require the extra step of figuring out how to do things on a Mac. Unfortunately my office is a Mac office, otherwise I'd switch to a PC in a heartbeat.