From the course: Excel for Engineering Professionals
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Trends in charts: Trendlines - Microsoft Excel Tutorial
From the course: Excel for Engineering Professionals
Trends in charts: Trendlines
- [Instructor] We're engineers. We're not bean counters. We don't do trendlines. We're not projecting future sales. What we do is predict how our production process will perform if we change a couple of settings. So what we need is a regression line, not a trendline. Well, it turns out those two are the same thing. A trendline is nothing more than a regression line added to a chart, and there's no formulas involved. trendlines only make sense for some types of data and for some types of charts. Choose the wrong type of chart, and your trendline may produce utter nonsense. Have a look at this chart. Isn't it a beautiful fit? R squared equals one. It's impossible to get a better R squared, but look at the chart itself. It looks as if the data is equally spaced, but if we look at the X values here, we see a jump between the first three and the fourth item. So my data isn't equally spaced. What happened here?…
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