Variable Basics

What are Variables?

Overview

Variables are the items that form the logic of your model. Imagine you're building a forecast budget for your business. Examples of Variables might be: Total Revenues; Number of Employees; Office Costs.

If you're used to working in Excel, you can think of Variables as like the lines in your model, but a lot more powerful

Variables can reference inputs to the model (called Assumptions), or they can reference other Variables, through Calculations.

A Calculation might look something like:

Profits = Revenues - Costs

In this way, you can link Variables to each other and develop the structure of your model.

The rest of this section explains how to configure Variables and the huge range of ways you can work with them.

The Variables list view

By default, Variables are shown in a Tree View, but you can also view them in a flat list, or a grid.

Variable Tree View

In the Tree View, as shown above, the tree represents the relationships between the Variables. In this example, Revenues by region references Revenues by region and membership type, which in turn has a Calculation of Gym members * Revenue per member, hence these two Variables are shown as its children.

Using the Tree View, you can quickly navigate the relationships between Variables to understand and interrogate Calculations.

The Variables preview

Each Variable in the list can be previewed in detail, as per the example below:

Example Variable Preview