About scenarios

Microsoft Office Excel 2003

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About scenarios

Scenarios are part of a suite of commands sometimes called what-if analysis tools. A scenario is a set of values that Microsoft Excel saves and can substitute automatically in your worksheet. You can use scenarios to forecast the outcome of a worksheet model. You can create and save different groups of values on a worksheet and then switch to any of these new scenarios to view different results.

Creating scenarios    For example, if you want to create a budget but are uncertain of your revenue, you can define different values for the revenue and then switch between the scenarios to perform what-if analyses.

Worst Case scenario

In the example above, you could name the scenario Worst Case, set the value in cell B1 to $50,000, and set the value in cell B2 to $13,200.

Best Case scenario

You could name the second scenario Best Case and change the values in B1 to $150,000 and B2 to $26,000.

Scenario summary reports    To compare several scenarios, you can create a report that summarizes them on the same page. The report can list the scenarios side by side or summarize them in a PivotTable report.