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Tutorial for Excel Sales Forecasting

Table of Contents [Hide/Show] Tutorial for Excel Sales Forecasting    Prerequisites    Install the add-in    Creating Sales Data in Excel    Configure Connection to Lokad    Configure your first forecasting task    Retrieve your forecasts    What next?

Prerequisites

Microsoft® Excel® 2007 should be installed on your machine in order to use this software.

Install the add-in

• Download the setup file for Lokad Add-in for Excel 2007 and follow the installation process. Internet connection will be required. Additional components might be required to install in the process
• Get a Lokad account (unless you already have one)
  

You can check that the add-in is correctly installed by simply launching Microsoft Excel. Forecast menu should now appear in Excel within Data tab.

Lokad menu items

Creating Sales Data in Excel

Your initial data should be organized in tables with a simple format. Here's a simple layout for it:

Product Name	2009-01-01	2009-01-02	2009-01-03	2009-01-04
Product A	10	20	5	15
Product B	3	4	2	4
Product C	8	6	8	6

For the purposes of the tutorial, we suggest you to create a new Excel spreadsheet with a small sales listing, like the one listed above.


As you can see, the raw sales data is a simple table, where:

• first column holds product names;
• first row holds dates;
• cells hold the amount of sold items (or their total value) for the specified product within the specified date.
  

Configure Connection to Lokad

Now we need to configure connection to Lokad, that this Excel workbook will use:

• Select "Data | Forecast | Configure" in the Excel Ribbon UI. Lokad Forecasting panes should appear.
• Click on "Account: Configure".
• Enter login and password for your Lokad account.
  

Configuring the account

• Сlick Test to verify the entered data. Fix the issues, if there are any.
• Hit "OK" to accept the changes.
  

Congratulations, you have configured connection to Lokad forecasting services for the workbook. This would be a good time to press {Ctrl}+{S} to save it.

Configure your first forecasting task

Now we have a valid connection to Lokad forecasting services. And we also have some data that we want to forecast. The next step would be to configure the actual forecasting task:

• Click Add and enter name for your new forecasting task.
• Click on the Input field.
• Enter range dialog will pop-up asking for a source data. Select your table and hit 'OK'.
• Adjust the Forecasting Period field to match the desired type of forecast to be delivered. In our sample scenario this would be a daily forecast.
• Select the proper Number of Periods for the forecast.
• Click on the Output field. Enter range dialog will pop-up asking for a place to print forecasts to. Select an empty table that has Number of Products + 1 rows and Number of Forecasting Periods + 2 columns.
• Hit OK to accept the changes.
  

Selecting the Output range for a task

Retrieve your forecasts

In order to retrieve forecasts from Lokad services we simply need to hit Refresh button. This will:

1. Upload the numbers to your Lokad account.
2. Determine the time by which Lokad services will prepare your forecast.
3. Wait till that time comes.
4. Download forecasts and print the results into the Excel range indicated in the Output field.
   

Let's see how this actually works out:

• Click Refresh button. The progress dialog should appear.
• If there are any issues with the connection or data, then Details button will indicate that. Clicking on it will display more information.
  

"Details" in bold indicates that some warnings or errors were found.

If you are forecasting over fresh data (that's the case with our tutorial), then the progress will eventually stop with the Waiting for the results message. Time of the expected forecast delivery will also be indicated.

Progress dialog indicates that data has successfully been scheduled for forecasting

At this point you can close the progress dialog, save your workbook and even close it to return to it later.

When the scheduled time comes, you can simply re-open the saved workbook and hit Refresh again. If you haven't made any changes that require forecast recalculation, then the forecast results will be downloaded and printed out to the Excel cells selected in the Output field.

Forecasts were retrieved

Congratulations, that's the end of the tutorial.

What next?

• You may be interested in other software products that allow to leverage our forecasting technologies in various scenarios.
• Support would be glad to provide assistance and receive feedback on technologies and products. Additionally there are forums to share experience and knowledge.
• Developers might be interested in the Open Source project containing full source code for this Lokad Add-in for Microsoft Excel.