Spreadsheets as Decision Support Tools – Case Study on Automatic Trend Lines

Nowadays many applications working with data sets have export options to the spreadsheet format. Most of the reasons are related to the common user's experience with such products and to the possibility to build up further on something that is more than a simple static and read only report.Beyond generating alerts for exceptions or identifying clusters, association rules, decision trees, and many other patterns, the purpose of Business Intelligence is also to determine trends and make predictions about the future based on historical data. In this context, this paper shows some practical results after testing the automatic creation of time series charts and trend lines corresponding to the user's preferences and not forgetting to suggest the most appropriate trend for the tested data