Teaching Note—Some Practical Issues with Excel Solver: Lessons for Students and Instructors

Spreadsheets have become the principal software application for teaching decision models in most business schools. In particular, Excel Solver is used extensively for solving and analyzing optimization models. However, there are a number of important issues in using Solver of which many users are unaware. These include the impact of spreadsheet design and cell formatting on Solver reports, handling of lower and upper bound constraints, and dealing with the implications of implicit assumptions in spreadsheet models when interpreting Solver sensitivity reports. Students and instructors, as well as most popular textbooks, rarely pay sufficient attention to these issues. This article summarizes these important issues, provides guidelines for avoiding problems, and offers examples that can be incorporated into the classroom.