David J. Braden said:
Yes.
But in many not-unreasonable cases, that approach stinks.
Jerry W. Lewis, in particular, has shown how much better Trendline is
than not only LINEST (fixed in Excel 11), but in many other dedicated
stat packages. As far as my own tests go, LINEST never dominates
TrendLine when all you care for is the coefficients, even for v. 11 (XL
2003).
XL11 (v2003) has significantly improved LINEST; it might be up to the
very, very high standards that TrendLine sets.
Bottom line? Cannot go wrong with Trendline, and from what I can tell,
you may do as well with LINEST() *only* in version 11 of Excel, but
certainly in no earlier version.
You can find code to extract coefficients from Trendline by Googling for
such under my name; you can find other workarounds by Googling under
Jerry's name.
Regards,
Dave Braden
MVP - Excel