Frontline solves Excel 2008's Solver shortfall

Stephen Withers
Monday, 01 September 2008 05:16

Business IT - Technology

Mac spreadsheet jockeys: the wait for an Excel 2008-compatible version of Solver is over. Developer Frontline Systems is offering a free download of the popular spreadsheet add-on for Office 2008 users.

Solver has long been a feature of Excel. It is used to solve optimisation problems (where the goal is to maximise the value of an objective function subject to certain constraints). Such problems are commonplace in business and finance, so techniques for solving them are a standard part of management education.

Solver for Mac Excel 2008 was developed by Frontline Systems, with some technical assistance from Microsoft. The software itself is available free of charge, as is technical support via phone and email.

So what's in it for Frontline? In the short term, not a lot! The company does offer related software products that don't come free, but they are currently for Windows and Linux, not Mac OS X.

Frontline is considering the development of a Mac version of its Solver Platform SDK, which allows developers to add optimisation and Monte Carlo simulation to their applications.

According to Frontline officials, Solver for Mac Excel 2008 should work with Solver models created in Excel 2004, although any VBA macros intended to control Solver will not work. No surprises there, as Microsoft's decision to drop VBA from Office 2008 was the reason for the delay in bringing Solver to the new version of Excel.

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