Projecting Farther
So far, you have manages to project The Body Shop’s financial statements through 2002. Now, extend your projection to years 2003 and 2004. See Table 3 for Excel commands. A simple way to do this is to copy your model for two additional years. Before copying the formulas from column B to columns C and D, make sure that any references to your Input Data (cells B3 through B12) are absolute references as opposed to relative references. An absolute reference means that when you copy cells B16 through B35 to other parts of your spreadsheet, the cells are still linked back to the originals (i.e., B5). Otherwise, the program assumes that the cells should be linked to new cells, such as C5. To make a reference absolute, put in dollar signs-$B$3, instead of B3. Now you should be ready to copy: