How to Find the Slope in Google Sheets

The slope describes the direction and the steepness of a line. A line that goes up from left to right has a positive slope. In contrast, a line that goes down from left to right has a negative slope.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to find the slope in Google Sheets using charts. We will use the New England Population from 1710 to 2010 as our sample data set. See this sample sheet.

How to find the slope using charts

You can easily find the slope in google sheets through scatter charts with the added trendline discussed in our previous tutorials. Here are the steps:

How to find the slope without using charts

You can also find the slope by adding a SLOPE function to a cell in your sheet. The syntax in Google Sheets is =SLOPE(data_y, data_x). The data_y refers to the range of the cells containing the dependent variable (in our sample, population). The data_x refers to the range of cells that contain the independent variable (year). This function will return the same value of the slope as the chart method but with more precision.