One of the most common mistakes people make when building sensitivity tables is that they like to use their assumptions to drive both the calculation and the input variables around the edge of the sensitivity table. Let me explain why this is an issue and why it's incorrect. At the moment, our sensitivity table is working as it should. We've got the middle number here, the center number, which is driven by the unit cost of 0.45 and the price of 4, and that matches the profitability we currently have over here. Now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna adjust this input cost so it's no longer hard coded. And I'm gonna link it to the 0.45 here, and I'm also going to link the price into here. Now, if you look back at the table, the central cell no longer says 57,950. It says 18,800. And we have an identical row above, and the numbers to the left are also identical, which is kind of weird, right? It's kind of weird. You think, what's the problem? The issue is this, the number here, let's take this number 3 for the price, for example. The way that the sensitivity table works is that Excel will take this number 3, paste it into this cell here, and then calculate the profits, and then it will paste the profit into this cell here, and then it'll repeat for each of the values. The problem we have is that as soon as the 3 is pasted into here, then this cell here now becomes a 3, which makes this cell a 2, and it kind of creates this circular reference, which means that the output numbers generated are complete nonsense. Now, there is a way around this. What I need to do is create copies of our assumptions, okay? So my copied or my linked cells are going to be these ones. I'm gonna link this to here, and I'm going to link this one to here. Now these, it says copy, they're really linked, okay? So these are definitely linked, these are formulas, okay? These two cells here are formulas.

And we're going to use these cells to drive our calculations. So I'm gonna change the revenue. The revenue is no longer be gonna be calculated using the assumption directly. I'm going to use the copied cell, okay? The same with the variable cost. I'm no longer going to use the assumption, I'm going to use this copied cell here, okay? What I'm also going to do when I build the data table, my row input cell, which is the the cell that's gonna have its value changed, is going to be the 0.45 from the copied cell column and the column input cell is going to be the 4 also from the copied cell column. When I press enter, now we get back to our correct answer. So the edge cells, the variable cells, can now be driven by the unit cost assumption and by the actual price assumption. The reason it's working this time is that the values here are no longer affecting the assumption itself, they're affecting these copied cells, which means that these numbers stay the same, and therefore the values around the edge of the data table also stay the same, which gives us a static output for our data table and that means that it works fine.