It gives your audience the ability to test their calculations and can be a pivotal part of the peer-review process. In academia, many people add equations next to their graphs to provide the reader with as much information as possible. Scholarly workĪnother common instance is if you are working on a scholarly article or other academic work. If presenting your graph to a team of investors or strategists, they can use the equation displayed on the chart to make their own forecasts using calculations. The addition of a trendline to a graph gives your audience an idea of the trajectory of the values, which they can use to make business decisions such as ordering stock, introduction of new products or marketing campaigns and even what times of year are most profitable. Here are some of the most common instances when you may want to add an equation to your Excel graph: Forecasting trendsįor people in fields like business, finance or technology, a common method of predicting performance is by turning data sets into graphs. When to add an equation to a graph in Excel