DOWNLOAD THE EXCEL FILE

How do you show a forecast honestly, when you don’t actually know what happens next?

A fan chart is the answer. Historical data runs as a solid line, then the future
“fans out” into shaded bands — base case, best case, worst case — so your reader
sees the range of outcomes instead of one confident line that might be wrong.

It’s how central banks present inflation forecasts. In this tutorial we build one
from scratch in Excel, including CAGR labels that update themselves.