Excel is incredibly powerful when your data is complete, but what happens when you need to solve for unknown variables? Enter Goal Seek and the Solver add-in, two tools that let Excel do the heavy ...

An optimization problem is one where you have to make the best decision (choose the best investments, minimize your company’s costs, find the class schedule with the fewest morning classes, or so on).

Along with Visual Basic for Applications, the scripting language used in many business-oriented spreadsheets, Excel also lost Solver when it was upgraded to be included in Office 2008. Since Solver ...