One of the advantages of a spreadsheet program like Excel, is its ability to explore what-if situations. Scenarios provide one way to explore the potential outcomes from different sets of possible data, as discussed in lesson 1.4.

Excel also provides a few other options for experimenting with your worksheet data, under different conditions or constraints. Excel’s one and two input data table features, can show you the results of worksheet formulas, based on different ranges of hypothetical values. Excel’s Goal seek and Solver features can take what-If analysis one step further by letting you find optimal values based on constraints or conditions you impose.

In this lesson you will learn about one input and two input data tables, Excel’s Goal Seek feature, and Excel’s solver. In the exercise, you will practice using Goal Seek.