Jerry---
You allude to "several commercial add-ins to do more complicated analysis in
Excel "; I assume you aren't referring to Matlab or Mathematica interfaces.
What exactly do you have in mind? Rather, what would *you* recommend, and
why?

TIA
Dave B

"Jerry W. Lewis" wrote in message
...
Mike wrote:

...

I think my question has been answered. Excel does not have any functions
that allow you to forecast or trend beyond a linear trend or forecast
(Which I am very surprised).


That depends on how you are defining "linear". As noted in my first post
in this thread, TREND can do polynomial, multiple regression, etc.
forcasting. Models that are linear in the unknown coefficients are a far
richer set than just straight lines.

Also, with Solver or VBA, it is possible to fit any model that you wish,
you just have to work a bit harder. Also there are several commercial
add-ins to do more complicated analysis in Excel (try a Google search). Or
you can use Excel as a convenient interface into the widely used
statistics package R
www.r-project.org

Jerry