Goal Seek

“I wish you could reverse engineer the answer.”

When we do the forecasting, pricing or some kind of modeling, we move forward in spreadsheets by inputting the values for the variables and letting the formulas calculate the end results such as net income or gross margin.

However, sometimes, we know what kind of end results we need but have to figure out what kind of inputs are required to get those end result. This is the so-called reverse engineering.

And there is a way to do that. I posted on LinkedIn a PowerPoint slide that shows the secret Excel moves that will help you reverse engineer your answer. Let’s see if I can get that slide on here.

Hmm, the slide ends up being a little fuzzy so next time I need to make the numbers larger.

Anyway, this is a neat trick to quickly arrive at some answers if you need to back into them. As the slides show, certain conditions or rules need to be met before the Goal Seek works.

I know that when I used Goal Seek, the program managers and his people were like, “Whoa, what did you do?” Felt like a genius that day.