1.

To begin, start Excel 2003 and open the file named Practice 5 in your Excel 2003 Practice folder.

File->Open

This worksheet contains a daily budget for a small manufacturing company. Our goal is to find how out many units we must produce (sell), to create a profit of 100 dollars per day. Currently, there are 96 units sold daily for a loss of 50.88.

2.

First, select cell B8 (the profit cell) and choose Tools->Goal Seek from the menu bar.

You can see that the cell reference B8 (for the profit formula) is visible in the first text field.

In the next text field, labelled To value, Type 100. This is the daily profit we would like to make.

Finally, in the last text field, enter the cell that will be changed to meet the profit goal of 100. The profit formula in cell B8 must be dependant on the value in the changing cell.

Since we want to find how many units we need to sell to make a profit of 100, the changing cell should be B2. This is the cell that contains the value for units sold.

3.

The Goal Seek box should look like this when you are finished entering the goal value and the cell references.

Click OK to find out how many units must be sold to make a profit of 100.

4.

When Goal Seek finds a solution, the values will be entered into the worksheet. You can see in cell B2 that the units sold value is now 699.52. If this many units are sold, the profit will be 100. If you click the cancel button on the goal seek status box, the worksheet will revert to the original values. If you click OK the worksheet will retain the Goal Seek solution values. For this exercise click OK.

5.

Change the price per unit in worksheet cell B3 to 10 dollars, select cell B8, and invoke goal seek again by choosing Tools->Goal Seek from the menu bar.

Enter 100 for the value that we want to seek, and enter B2 for the changing cell the same as before.

In this case, the price per unit has been increased to 10, so goal seek should give a different solution. Click OK for a solution.

6.

You can see from the worksheet, that if the price per unit is 10, we need to sell 33.31 units to make a profit of 100 dollars. Click OK to retain the values from the solution.

7.

Save your work and exit Excel.