Goal Seek

Hi Sally,

Thank you for your question and welcome to the forum.

Goal Seek is used to get a particular result when you're not sure of the starting value.

E.g. if the answer is 64, and the first number is 8, what is the second number? Is it 8 multiplied by 8, or 8 multiplied by 7? Use Goal Seek to find out.

If you had 8 in cell A1, 9 in cell A2 and in cell A3 a formula that multiplies a1 and a2 thus displaying then answer of 72.

Use Goal Seek to determine the value that A2 needs to be in order to update the result in A3 to 80.

Go to the Data tab, What-If-Analysis options and choose Goal Seek. The three arguments will be as follows:

SET CELL: A3
TO VALUE: 80
BY CHANGING CELL: A2

This will update the formula in cell A3 to 80 and caluclate the new value in cell A2.

I hope this answers your question.

Regards

Simon