Trendlines and Moving Average in Excel

Excel 365 2016 2013 2010 2003
When you're plotting data over time, you may want to plot a trend line that describes the data. A trend line points out general trends in your data.
Chart with a Trend Line Excel 2007

In some cases, you can forecast future data with trend lines. A single series can have more than one trend line.

Excel makes adding a trend line to a chart quite simple. In popup menu select Add Trendline... to display the Add Trendline dialog box.

popup to add trend line Excel 2007

The type of trend line that you choose depends on your data. Linear trends are most common, but some data can be described more effectively with another type.

Add Trendline Excel 2007

One of the options on the Trendline Options tab is Moving Average, which is useful for smoothing out data that has a lot of variation (that is, "noisy" data). The Moving Average option enables you to specify the number of data points to include in each average.

For example, if you select 5, Excel averages every five data points.

The Trendline Options tab enables you to specify a name to appear in the legend and the number of periods that you want to forecast. Additional options let you set the intercept value, specify that the equation used for the trend line should appear on the chart, and choose whether the R-squared value appears on the chart.

Delete a trendline

Click the trendline you want to delete and then press Delete.

Please, disable AdBlock and reload the page to continue

Today, 30% of our visitors use Ad-Block to block ads.We understand your pain with ads, but without ads, we won't be able to provide you with free content soon. If you need our content for work or study, please support our efforts and disable AdBlock for our site. As you will see, we have a lot of helpful information to share.

Adding Up/Down Bars to a line chart

Adding Up/Down Bars to a line chart

If you have a line chart with two different data series, you might want to compare those series at each point along the horizontal axis. There are two different options for this, available in two locations along the Layout tab of the ribbon.
Creating automatically extended plot ranges

Creating automatically extended plot ranges

If you often need to adjust your data ranges so that your charts plot an updated data range, you may be interested in a trick that forces Excel to update the chart's data range whenever you add new data to your worksheet.
Creating a Candlestick Stock chart

Creating a Candlestick Stock chart

Candlestick chart is a style of bar-chart used primarily to describe price movements of a security, derivative, or currency over time. It is a combination of a line-chart and a bar-chart, in that each bar represents the range of price movement over a given time interval. It is most often used in technical analysis of equity and currency price patterns.