Further Considerations on Spreadsheet - Based Automatic Trend Lines

Abstract

Most of the nowadays business applications working with data sets allow exports to the spreadsheet format. This fact is related to the experience of common business users with such products and to the possibility to couple what they have with something containing many models, functions and possibilities to process and represent data, by that getting something in dynamics and much more than a simple static less useful report.

The purpose of Business Intelligence is to identify clusters, profiles, association rules, decision trees and many other patterns or even behaviors, but also to generate alerts for exceptions, determine trends and make predictions about the future based on historical data. In this context, the paper shows some practical results obtained after testing both the automatic creation of scatter charts and trend lines corresponding to the user’s preferences and the automatic suggesting of the most appropriate trend for the tested data mostly based on the statistical measure of how close they are to the regression function.

Keywords: Spreadsheets, Business Intelligence (BI), Microsoft (MS) Office Excel trends, Google Sheets Trends

JEL Classification: C130, D810, D830