How to create a forecast in Power BI Desktop

[PrimaSatria]

Dear all,

I have a simple data, as below:
Column A: Date
Column B: Project
Column C: Plan (qty)
Column 😧 Actual (qty)

Currently I have data of Plan and Actual from January till September, how to forecast the Actual for October, November and December and what is the best visual for it?

Thank you,
Prima Indonesia

[danextian]

This is honestly a very generic question. Power BI itself has its own forecasting feature but each company may have its ow methodology. If you simply want to show plan vs actual, you can just use a line chart.

[Royel]

Hi @PrimaSatria  here is a good example how you can easily create your forecast value 

 https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/DAX-Commands-and-Tips/forecasting-sales-based-on-history/m... 

Best Forecasting Visuals: 

1. Line Chart
2. Area Chart
3. Combo Chart
4. Ribbon Chart
5. Waterfall Chart

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[FBergamaschi]

This is a statistical thing. Unless you have at least 20 actual data points, a forecast is completely meaningless.

And even if you have those points, you need to check for statistical significance, or even in that case it is meaningless.

If you want something for free, BUT without any reliability, yes you can use the forecast in Power BI available only for line charts, but again here you need to take data carefully since you have so few points

IN case you use LINESTX (a difficul function to use), please make sure to check for the significance (t statistics / pvalues). A forecast with a pvalue not in line with what you are looking for is not to be used.

So please try to get more actuals, you do not have enough at the moment

Best

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Francesco Bergamaschi

MBA, M.Eng, M.Econ, Professor of BI

If this helped, please consider giving kudos and mark as a solution

@me in replies or I'll lose your thread

Want to check your DAX skills? Answer my biweekly DAX challenges on the kubisco Linkedin page

Consider voting this Power BI idea

Francesco Bergamaschi

MBA, M.Eng, M.Econ, Professor of BI

[lbendlin]

You don't have a lot of data points so the forecast will not be overly meaningful. You can use the built-in "Forecast line"  feature or you can use the (equivalent) LINESTX function to compute the slope of your extrapolation.