Sales Pipeline Cleanup and Weighted Forecast in Excel

<p>On the first day of the quarter, the founder of Sahyadri Workspaces, a Pune office-interiors company, wants to know how much the business will actually close by December. The bank wants the same number before it renews a credit line. The CRM's dashboard says the pipeline is worth more than ₹10 crore, and Meera Kulkarni, who runs sales operations, doesn't believe it. In your own personal workbook you build her forecast from the raw CRM export: amounts stored as text that SUM silently skips, deals written twice by a sync error, the same stage under five different names, won and lost deals mixed into the pipeline, and close dates that have already passed. You'll use helper columns, a running COUNTIF, TRIM and XLOOKUP, an Excel Table, COUNTIFS and SUMIFS, stage probabilities, a two-sided date window, pipeline coverage and a chart. Every lesson then hands the same job to your AI (Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini) and shows you exactly how to catch its mistakes. In the capstone your AI builds the forecast for the messier Mumbai branch, near-duplicates and text dates and all, and you prove it right.</p>

Tools: Sales Pipeline and Forecasting, Excel Formulas (SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, COUNTIF), Cleaning Text Numbers, Duplicates and Dates, Excel Tables and XLOOKUP, Weighted Forecast and Pipeline Coverage, Conditional Formatting and Charts, AI Assistants for Excel