Summary

Often, Excel’s What-If Analysis features are overlooked as a means to automate repetitive tasks in Excel. In this chapter, you learned about the PMT, CUMIPMT, and CUMPRINC functions, which can be used to calculate loan payments and total interest for one or more periods in a loan. We used those functions as the basis for walking through the What-If Analysis features in Excel. For instance, the Scenario Manager feature enables you to swap different sets of inputs into a worksheet and compare the results by way of scenario reports. Alternatively, Goal Seek allows you to solve for a single missing input. This eliminates the manual guesswork that can otherwise be involved in trying to determine the missing amount.

Then, our trip through the Data | What-If Analysis menu took us to the Data Table feature. Data Tables can solve multiple equations at once based on swapping out one or more inputs. This gives your formulas better integrity because you don’t have to...