From the course: Excel for Engineering Professionals

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Goal seek

Goal seek

- [Lecturer] Hey, you're an engineer, right? So you know process models usually return an end result but sometimes we already know the end result but we need the settings to get there. Rewriting your formula so they calculate the input needed for a certain output is not easy at all and sometimes you simply don't have the time. Excel gives us a simple tool to do just this. You can ask it to find the target value in one cell by changing the value of another cell. Let's have a look at this worksheet. It contains a chart charting the values of this formula over here, which is actually just a third order polynomial. And what I want to know is, at which point does this line hit the X axis or to translate that into math, when does Y equal zero? Which X do we need to get a Y of zero? If you look at this line, you'll see that the line crosses the X axis in three different positions. So let's just find one and I'll put an…

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