By Bill Jelen

Bill Jelen is the author of 24 books on Microsoft Office Excel. He is a regular guest on TechTV with Leo Laporte and the host of MrExcel.com, which includes more than 300,000 questions and answers about Excel.

In Excel 2007, the Goal Seek command is great for solving certain equations backward. For example, if you know that you want to obtain a 48-month loan for a car at 5% interest, you can use Goal Seek to figure out what loan amount would result in a $490 monthly payment.

This article is an excerpt from Learn Excel 97-2007 from MrExcel by Bill Jelen. Buy the print edition or download a free e-book edition from MrExcel.com.

Other articles by this author

Excel 2007

• Sort all red cells to the top of a report
• Use validation to create dependent lists
• How to fit a multiline heading into one cell
• Change the width of all columns with one command
• How to make a wide report fit to one page wide by many pages tall
• For each cell in column A, have three rows in column B
• Customize anything on a chart by right-clicking
• Display a chart axis in trillions
• Raise a number to a fraction to find the square or third root
• Total minutes that exceed an hour
• Calculate a running percentage of total
• Calculate a trendline forecast
• Rank scores in Excel 2007
• How to do 40 different what-if analyses quickly

Excel 2003

• Use color banding to locate the active cell
• Three ways to convert numbers to text
• Five ways to subtotal values in repeating data
• Conditional formatting: Considering the fourth option
• Locate duplicates by using conditional formatting
• Change cell background color using VBA