Money has a sign because it can flow in one of two ways. Generally we use +
for money coming at us (a loan from the bank, interested received on a
saving account, etc) and a negative sign (-) for money leaving us (payment
made on a loan, taxes paid (you do pay taxes, I hope), deposits to a savings
account, etc)
best wishes
--
Bernard V Liengme
www.stfx.ca/people/bliengme
remove caps from email

"Thomas Hastings" <Thomas wrote in
message ...
Thanks - this was helpful to me too, five months later.

Can you explain to me, however, why the third argument in this function
has
to be entered as a negative number?

There must be a finance-related reason, but I'm using this formula to
calculate an average GDP growth rate over a period of time, and it's
highly
counter-intuitive (and therefore hard to teach) that one needs to make the
GDP in the base year negative.

thanks, -

Thomas Hastings


" wrote:

"Assad" wrote:
Could someone advise, on finding annual growth rate equation.
Example is:-
An X items was valued at 13500 and after 24 Years it is
valued at 180000.
The equation shall forecast, Annual Growth Rate in %.
( which means, value X grown over by Y % ( which shall be static
value )

=rate(24, 0, -13500, 180000)

(11.4% per year.)

and another addition of Y for next year and so on till 24th year.

This part of your question is unclear. If you are asking for a formula
that
will give you "Y", that cannot be done unless you first know the compound
growth rate. But if you are asking how to compute the compound growth
rate
given some "Y" -- for example, 2000 -- then:

=rate(24, -2000, -13500, 180000)

(6.84% per year.)