The Best Chips Company produces and sells potato chips throughout the country. Its sales have been growing steadily over the past 10 years, as shown in Figure 16.2 and the file Exponential...

The Best Chips Company produces and sells potato chips throughout the country. Its sales have been growing steadily over the past 10 years, as shown in Figure 16.2 and the file Exponential Growth.xlsx. 2 (Note that we have indexed the years so that year 1 corresponds to 1997.) The company wants to predict its sales for the next couple of years, assuming that the upward trend it has observed in the past 10 years will continue in the future. How should the company proceed?

Objective To fit linear and exponential trendlines to the company’s historical sales data and to use the better of these trendlines to predict future sales.