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Solver for Excel 2008 Under Development

Friday June 27, 2008 2:27 pm PDT by longofest
Microsoft's MacBU has announced that it is working to bring Solver to Excel 2008 as part of a future update.

Today, the best option for people who need Solver is to run Excel 2004 and Excel 2008 side-by-side, and switch to the 2004 environment for workbooks that require Solver.

However, we have been hearing loud and clear from our customers particularly in education that the side-by-side solution is suboptimal. For many people, Solver is a critical and necessary tool for coursework, and they want to work with Solver natively in the Excel 2008 environment. [...]

The Excel team is actively working to bring Solver to Excel 2008 as part of a future update. We have two distinct technical approaches and are exploring both. Once we have established which is the best option and have code that meets our quality bar we will announce a timeframe for availability here on Mojo.


Solver is an Excel add-in that allows linear programming in Excel, and was initially released for the Mac when Excel 2004 shipped but was dropped from Excel 2008 due to its dependency on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) support.

Microsoft has previously announced that VBA support will be coming back to Mac Office in the next version.
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SailorTom
47 months ago
I hope that one of the 'distinct technical approches' is just porting the whole lot of VBA over. I'd rather they just get on and do that so we can have it sooner.
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shadowfax
47 months ago
huh.... How about MathML Equation support in Word 2008 (and all other Office docs) so that I can actually look at Office 2007 documents that have math in them.
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Decrepit
47 months ago
I *might* go back to using Office 2008 if this were to show up. Right now, I keep a whole Windows machine just for Office 2007.
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amusiccale
47 months ago
"suboptimal" indeed.
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ArtOfWarfare
47 months ago

and have code that meets our quality bar


That won't take long.
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Makosuke
47 months ago
I'm still a little mystified as to how 2008 got out the door without at least Solver to begin with. Maybe that's because where I work we use that a LOT, but it sure seems like a huge omission for anybody doing work outside finance stuff with Excel.

We're certainly not going to upgrade until at least then, if not full VB support.

Also, "suboptimal"? How about "ridiculous," "insulting," "just plain stupid," or maybe "Why the hell would I run the two side by side instead of just not giving you several hundred dollars for a half-finished release and just use the one that does its job?"
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Rocketman
47 months ago

and have code that meets our quality bar


Isn't that supposed to be substantially easier to achieve on Mac OS? Less legacy hardware and software.

Rocketman
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Fukui
47 months ago

Isn't that supposed to be substantially easier to achieve on Mac OS? Less legacy hardware and software.

Its MS Office man! Legacy is the name of the game! :p
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johncarync
47 months ago
I'd like to thank Microsoft for giving me a pleasant-sounding synonym for "it sucks," "it's crap," "horrible," and "do it again" for me to use in meetings. "Your work is suboptimal" will now be heard by my staff when they screw up.:)

-John

PS: In my opinion, all of the Office 2008 applications are suboptimal.
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jmmo20
47 months ago
the funny thing is that the first thing I thought after I read the article name was "a fix that solves all the issues with the under-developed version 2008 of MS Excel"

:(

Seriously .. Office 2008 is faster but is full of cr*p. Worse version ever.
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