Once upon a time, a fellow named Strunk wrote a little style-guide, and a student of his, mister White, made it a world hit.
Because of that, the style rules in that little booklet have becomes something of a holy writ in English classrooms and beyond.
One of those rules was that you should avoid the passive voice. Ironically, the authors of the rule seem to have misunderstood what the passive voice actually is, as is described in this nice column by Geoffrey K. Pullum (co-author of CGEL) on chronicle.com:
Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.
After this unpromising start, there is some fairly sensible style advice: The authors explicitly say they do not mean "that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice," which is "frequently convenient and sometimes necessary." They give good examples to show that the choice between active and passive may depend on the topic under discussion.
Sadly, writing tutors tend to ignore this moderation, and simply red-circle everything that looks like a passive, just as Microsoft Word's grammar checker underlines every passive in wavy green to signal that you should try to get rid of it. That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done.
So there you have the short and the long of it: a well-mean advice was oversimplified, and very badly explained, and as a result, some people are still on a crusade against everything that looks like a passive voice.
The sentence that you quote in your question can easily be interpreted as being active, with the past participle aimed being used as attributive to it. Is is simply a copulative in that case.
The construction "will be increased by" emphasises the fact that some individual or small group makes the decision about the amount of the increase, and that if they decide that the dividend will increase by 4% each year for 8 years, then the dividend will indeed increase by exactly 4% for each of those years, unless the company somehow runs out of money (or they change their mind, of course).
On the other hand, saying "will increase by" could refer to an approximate amount that is measured; nobody is choosing the exact value. For example, if you said that a company increased profits by 4% a year for 8 years, it would be very unlikely in the real world that it was exactly 4% each and every year. It could be 3.95% or 4.05% and that is still near enough that nobody will quibble that your prediction was wrong.
In this case, using the passive voice in the question, they are telling you that you can simply do the mathematics about compound interest, without needing to worry about what might happen if the numbers weren't exactly 4% for every one of the 8 years the question refers to.
Best Answer
Mr C is right that there's no problem with the passive voice here; Ms A is right that there is a different problem with your example sentence and your 'where' should be 'when'.
That said, it's worth saying that the reason Microsoft Word always dings the passive voice is because English teachers generally ding the passive voice.
In the first five Google results for "passive voice", you've got Hamilton College's English Department sniping
Also in the first five, you have Purdue University's English Department opining with bolded and underlined text
And it takes until you get to UNC's Writing Corner to read
So English teachers (a) generally learn at some point during their tertiary education that wordy Jamesian prose lost and manly terse Hemingway won and (b) quickly realize that the passive voice lets students reach their word counts much too quickly and (c) often fall back on blanket proscription instead of explaining when and how to use the passive voice for best effect.
In your [corrected] example,
the focus is on the grid itself, which is where it should be. Starting in on a subject
teaches us a little history but involves needless advertising and verbiage.
meanwhile, has its own host of problems, if you weren't writing this for a women or cultural studies credit.
You don't have to just sit there and take misguided abuse from that paperclip, though. You can follow the instructions in this article in reverse and just tell the program to stop bothering you about the passive voice at all.