Excel 2024: Find Optimal Solutions with Solver

November 4, 2024 - by Bill Jelen

Excel was not the first spreadsheet program. Lotus 1-2-3 was not the first spreadsheet program. The first spreadsheet program was VisiCalc in 1979. Developed by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, VisiCalc was published by Dan Fylstra. Today, Dan Fylstra runs Frontline Systems. His company wrote the Solver used in Excel. Frontline Systems has also developed a whole suite of analytics software that works with Excel.

If you have Excel, you have Solver. It may not be enabled, but you have it. To enable Solver in Excel, press Alt+T followed by I. Add a checkmark next to Solver Add-in.

Press Alt+T I to display the Add-ins dialog. Choose the box next to Solver Add-in to load Solver.

To successfully use Solver, you have to build a worksheet model that has three elements:

There has to be a single Goal cell. This is a cell that you either want to minimize, maximize, or set to a particular value.
There can be many input cells. This is one fundamental improvement over Goal Seek, which can deal with only one input cell.
There can be constraints.

More Reading

Excel 2024: Do 60 What-If Analyses with a Sensitivity Analysis »

October 31, 2024 - by Bill Jelen

Goal Seek lets you find the set of inputs that lead to a particular result. Sometimes, you want to see many different results from various combinations of inputs. Provided that you have only two input cells to change, the Data Table feature will do a sensitivity analysis.

Excel 2024: Back into an Answer by Using Goal Seek »

October 28, 2024 - by Bill Jelen

Have you ever found yourself plugging in successively higher and lower values into an input cell, hoping to arrive at a certain answer?

Excel 2024: Protect All Formula Cells »

October 21, 2024 - by Bill Jelen

It seems unusual, but all 16 billion cells on a worksheet start out with their Locked property set to True. You need to unlock all of the cells first.

Cool Excel Sh*t

March 2021

Cool Excel Sh*t is designed with the Excel guru in mind, introducing advanced, creative solutions and hacks for the software's most challenging problems.

MrExcel 2021 - Unmasking Excel

February 2021

This is a 5th edition of MrExcel XL. Updates for 2021 include: LAMBDA, LET, Power Query Fuzzy Match, Sort & Filter in Sheet View, Cut-out people, Save object as image, STOCKHISTORY, Wolfram Alpha Data Types, Custom Data Types from Power Query, Weather data types, bilingual spreadsheets, Performance improvements, Unhide multiple worksheets, Action pen, Collapsible task panes, LET function to re-use calculations, store formulas using LAMBDA, Recursive LAMBDA, Branching LAMBDA, Lambda to return a picture, Excel function quick reference.

Master Your Data with Power Query in Excel and Power BI

August 2021

Despite the moniker "data monkey," we information workers are often more like data magicians. Our data seldom enters our world in a ready-to-consume format; it can take hours of cleaning, filtering, and reshaping to get things ready to go. Power Query will make this process faster the first time and reduce it to a single button click every subsequent time.

Microsoft 365 Excel: The Only App That Matters

June 2022

Excel Worksheet, Power Query, Power Pivot, Power BI. Calculations, Analytics, Modeling, Data Analysis and Dashboard Reporting for the New Era of Dynamic Data Driven Decision Making & Insight!

see more products »

Excel 2024: Find Optimal Solutions with Solver

More Reading

Featured Products