Finding X on Excel scatter plot/trend line

Posted by Wilka on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Wilka
Published on 2010-04-01T10:43:37Z Indexed on 2010/04/01 10:53 UTC
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If I have some data in an scatter plot in Excel, e.g.

X Y
1 10
2 20
3 30
4 40
5 50

and I want to find the Y value for X = 10, or X=3.5, or whatever (obviously this is a simplified example) I've been doing the following:

  • Add a trend-line to the scatter plot data
  • Format the trend-line to one that fits the data (linear in this case)
  • Display the equation for the trend-line on the chart
  • Type the equation into an empty cell, replacing x with a cell reference. E.g. "=10*A1" then put my X value into the cell A1

Is there a better way of doing this with Excel? It's quite a few steps, and fairly repetitive. Or maybe Excel is just a poor choice of application for doing this?

(I'm using Excel 2007)

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