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Trevor Hardy of the Canadian Football League -- Canada's counterpart to the NFL -- faced the task of scheduling 18 games for nine clubs throughout the 20-week season, balancing competing priorities for revenue, TV ratings, or player time -- while meeting a wide range of constraints, from times of day for fans in four time zones to traditional Labor Day rivalry match-ups.  Here's how he used optimization in Microsoft Excel to create significantly better schedules than the league had been able to create by hand.

Excel 2016 will feature five new forecasting functions as part of the new Forecast Sheet functionality. Linear will make it possible to predict a linear set of values within the existing values in your data set. ETS applies exponential smoothing to obtain forecasted values. ETS Seasonality detects seasonality patterns for a specific time series in the data set. ETS Confint provides a confidence interval for the forecast. ETS Stat returns the forecast’s requested statistic. The Ceiling, Floor, and Forecast functions have been dropped to compatibility status.

Excel Slicers are a great feature for Excel users. A slicer allows you to filter data - visually - by clicking on the data of interest. It is much easier to implement (just one click), easy to use, yet format-able and visually impressive. It is available for users of Excel 2010 and above. Find out more about slicers and how to use them, from our friend Duggirala Purnachandra, better known as Chandoo.