All articles with 'solver' Tag

Learn how to use Solver to allocate players evenly to Teams.
A Solver Tutorial.

Here is a tricky problem often faced by accountants and finance professionals: Let’s say you have 5 customers. Each of them need to pay you some money. Instead of paying the total amount in one go, they paid you in 30 small transactions. The total amount of these transactions matches how much they need to pay you. But you don’t know which customer paid which amounts. How would you reconcile the books?

If you match the transactions manually, it can take an eternity – after all there are more than 931 zillion combinations (5^30).

This is where solver can be handy. Solver can find optimal solution for problems like this before you finish your first cup of coffee.

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In the 35th session of Chandoo.org podcast, Let’s hear from Dan Fylstra, the creator of Excel Solver. I had the fortune of meeting Dan when I was in Santa Clara last month. I immediately asked him to be part of Chandoo.org podcast and he was kind enough to agree. So today let’s take a trip down the memory line, hear him talk about some of the fascinating all the early development stories of Solver, VisiCalc & Excel.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• Introduction
• Early days of Solver
• Working with VisiCalc, migration to Excel
• What keeps Dan busy these days
• Advice for anyone planning to learn Solver & business modelling

Yesterday was Halloween. To our readers who are not familiar with it, ‘Halloween is a colorful festival with lots of costumes, scary stories, theme parties and trick-or-treating, celebrated on 31st October, every year.” I have never celebrated Halloween as it is an unknown tradition in India where I live. But that is no excuse. Especially when the celebration calls for colorful clothes, scary themed houses and shrieking kids.

Of course, we are not going to have a traditional Halloween. Because,

• At our house, we use pumpkins to make sambar, not lights
• The only ones with costumes in our house are my kids.
• If I send my kids for trick or treat, they will get neither.

So that brings us to the only part of Halloween that I can celebrate. Telling scary stories.

So lets talk about the stuff that scares us. But bear in mind that I am not interested in that time when you & your cousin went camping and stumbled in to an abandoned log cabin to discover the …Save it for real Halloween.

We want to talk stuff that scares you in Excel of course.

Last week, we had a lovely poll on what are your favorite features of Excel? More than 120 people responded to it with various answers. So I did what any data analyst worth his salt would do,

I analyzed the data and here are the top 10 features in Excel according to you.

Read on to learn more.

Ok, You’ve just finished the mother of all Spreadsheets. Not only does it solve your companies budget, it tracks production, reports variances, makes a mean cup of coffee and some say, “it May Even Solve World Peace ?”.
But the boss walks in and asks “I have a list of items which I need to distribute evenly into colored buckets”
I had never thought of that option, Maybe I can constrain my model and let it work it out for me ?
Solver I need your help !

Do you ever think about questions like this?
1) What is the maximum profit we can make?
2) What is the best way to schedule employees in shifts?
3) What the best combination of tasks we can finish in a given time?

You might have heard about Excel Solver tool while trying to find solutions to questions above. If you have never used Solver or have little idea about it, then this post and video are for you.

Office 2010, the latest and greatest version of Microsoft Office Productivity applications is going to be available worldwide in the next few weeks. I have been using Office 2010 beta since November last year and recently upgraded my installation to the RTM version. I was pleasantly surprised when I ran Microsoft Excel 2010 for first time. It felt smooth, fast, responsive and looked great on my comp.

This week, I want to celebrate the launch of Excel 2010 and write about the following new features in Excel 2010.

Also, you can win a copy of Office 2010 – home & student edition by leaving a comment on this or any of the other excel 2010 posts scheduled for this week

In this installment of spreadcheats, we will learn how to use goal seek feature of excel. We will build a retirement savings calculator using excel. We will learn to use Excel’s FV() formula to estimate the corpus that can be accumulated by saving fixed amount every month.