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Excel Goal Seek

You are here: Home / Excel Formulas / Excel Goal Seek
Excel Goal Seek
October 2, 2019 by Mynda Treacy

Excel Goal Seek is another tool in the What-if Analysis suite on the Data tab of the ribbon. Goal Seek makes it easy to find the value required to meet a target value you specify.

Watch the Excel Goal Seek Video


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Excel Goal Seek

Let’s say your 13 year old son wants to save $10,000 to buy a car when they graduate school. They have a part-time job and can afford to save $100 a month in an account that pays 5% interest per annum.

We can use the FV function to calculate how much they’ll have after 5 years (60 months) of saving $100 at 5% interest p.a. compounded monthly:

=FV(5%/12,60,-$100,0,0)
=$6,800.61

But how many months will it take to save $10,000? I could manually change the number of months in the formula until I got close to $10,000, but that could take a lot of trial and error. It’s more efficient to let Excel’s Goal Seek do the work.

In the image below, column B contains my original calculation which I’ve copied to column C for Goal Seek to work its magic. Cell C7 contains the FV formula. This is my target value cell that I want to return $10,000.

Constraints: They can’t save more than $100 per month and they can’t get a higher interest rate, therefore the only variable is the number of months they can save.

All I need to do now is go to the Data tab > What-if Analysis > Goal Seek:

Excel goal seek dialog box

This opens the Excel Goal Seek dialog box (image below):

  • The Set cell is the cell that I want to contain $10,000. Note: the ‘Set cell’ must contain a formula.
  • The ‘To value’ is the target value I’d like the set cell to contain. Remember, the target is $10,000.
  • The ‘By changing cell’ is the cell I want to adjust. In my case it’s the number of saving months (periods). Note: if you prefer, this cell can be left empty for Goal Seek to solve but it cannot contain a formula.

run goal seek

Goal Seek may go through several iterations before it finds the solution. In which case you’ll see the window shown below:

iteration

Once Goal Seek finds the answer it will change the cell you referenced in the ‘by changing cell’ field, which in my example is cell C5:

goal seek result

And we can see it’ll take 84 months to save $10,000.

What if they managed to increase their savings by foregoing the latest video games each month. (I can hear it now…”Mum, I’d rather poke myself in the eye than not have the latest game…and anyway, no one calls them ‘video games’ anymore”).

But Mum is persuasive 😉 so she runs another Goal Seek in column D on the amount saved:

run goal seek again

And Goal Seek shows that with an increase of $47.05 per month they can save $10,000 in 60 months:

final result

Now comes the hard part of convincing my son to start saving for his own car!

Excel Goal Seek

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Ken McMillan

    January 15, 2021 at 2:54 am

    Thanks for all your tutorials. Great job presenting material!

    Reply
    • Mynda Treacy

      January 15, 2021 at 8:59 am

      Thanks so much, Ken!

      Reply
  2. Dave Goodmanson

    October 4, 2019 at 11:07 am

    Thanks for these tutorials Mynda, they are really nice byte-size, focussed lessons. It helps me because I tend to think, “Oh yeah I know Goal Seek”, but if I stop and look I’m ” now which cell is Set To?”, It is a good refresher on the way through, it doesn’t take long and I keep the file stored as a reference, without needing to go to Dr Google!
    Much appreciated,
    Dave

    Reply
    • Mynda Treacy

      October 4, 2019 at 1:14 pm

      Thanks, Dave. Glad you’ll find it useful 🙂

      Reply

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mynda treacy microsoft mvpHi, I'm Mynda Treacy and I run MOTH with my husband, Phil. Through our blog, webinars, YouTube channel and courses we hope we can help you learn Excel, Power Pivot and DAX, Power Query, Power BI, and Excel Dashboards.

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