If you’re working on the office budget, you might be collecting data from different departments.
Or maybe you’re planning your back to school spending.
- If you get bonus at the end of your summer job, you can use some higher budget numbers.
- If the bonus falls through, you’ll need your low budget estimates.
Store Data With Scenarios
With Excel Scenarios, you can store different sets of values (in up to 32 cells) in a workbook. Then, without any programming, you can switch between the saved values.
In this example, we store budget projections for two departments. View and print one department’s budget, and then switch to the other department, all in the same cells.
Download the Sample File
To see the written instructions for creating scenarios, please visit the Excel Scenarios page on the Contextures website.
There is a sample file that you can download, to see how the Scenarios work.
Watch the Excel Scenarios Video
To see the steps for creating and showing scenarios, you can watch this short video tutorial. I also share tips for quickly naming cells, and automatically adding those names to your formulas.
sure to date stamp it, or delete it before saving the workbook. You don’t want to keep potentially misleading data in your files.
Scenario Summary Formatting
And the Scenario Summary formatting is about as ugly as Excel gets – purple and grey.
Maybe they’ll improve that in the next version! But don’t hold your breath — I doubt that it will ever be changed.
Watch the Video
To see the steps for creating Scenario Summary, please watch this short video tutorial.
This video includes a tip for adding the Scenario command in the Excel 2010 Ribbon, so it is easy to switch between Scenarios.
More Scenario Tutorials
Here are links to 3 Scenario tutorials, on my Contextures site:
Create and Show Scenarios – With Scenarios in Excel, you can store multiple versions of data, in the same cells
Create Scenario Summaries – After you create 2 or more different Scenarios in Excel, use a Scenario Summary to show an overview of the data. This is a static report that is designed to show the Scenario data at a moment in time.
Automatically Show Scenarios – see how to use a macro to automatically show a Scenario, when you select its name from a drop down list on the worksheet
Scenarios Programming – Use these macros to create a list all the scenarios, or create new scenarios, or update the values for existing scenarios, from a list on the worksheet
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