On Mar 7, 11:26 am, jackco wrote:
I'm looking for a formular to price goods bought in 1900 to what they would
be worth today

Well, it depends on what "goods" you are talking about, not to mention
what country. But generally, for the US, people use the CPI. You can
find a CPI calculator at http://www.bls.gov/cpi . Note: the
calculator only goes back as far as 1913.

As for a formula, when I enter $100 in 1913 dollars, the calculator
says that is equivalent to $2044.61 in current dollars (2007). So the
average inflation rate can be computed as follows:

=rate(2007-1913, 0, -100, 2044.61)

Assuming that the same average rate applies to 1900 through 2007 (an
over-simplication), you could estimate the equivalent 1900 price as
follows:

=pv(A1, 2007-1900, 0, -2044.61)

where A1 contains the RATE(...) formula above.