News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

June 30, 2008

software

Solver shall return

Posted Jun. 30, ’08, 7:10 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Software

Office 2008 One of the many casualties in the Office 2004 to Office 2008 transition was Solver in Excel. It was dumped from Excel because it depended upon VBA. Another great result from Microsoft’s decision to get rid of VBA.

Solver is used for data analysis and business modeling. While most home users don’t use it, it’s a very powerful tool and many businesses cried out for it’s return.

Microsoft has promised its return:

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.

We definitely hear you, and we’re working on it.

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.

Good, but it should have been included from the beginning.

[via Mac Observer]


2 Comments

Dave-O said:

" and have code that meets our quality bar"
Shouldn't take too long to meet that exacting standard. Two weeks, tops.

June 30, 2008 1:16 PM
Kelmon said:

"Good, but it should have been included from the beginning."

I suspect this to be the motto of the Office:mac team. I honestly wasn't disappointed with Office:mac 2004 but I'm running Office 2007 at the moment rather than either Office:mac 2008 or iWork 08. What will be interesting to see is whether Apple offers proper Exchange support on the Mac before Microsoft does, in much the same way that they supported the Office XML file formats before Microsoft did. I understand why the Mac versions typically lag behind the Windows versions of Office, but it comes to something when 3rd parties support Office features in their Mac products before the Mac Business Unit does. Here's hoping that their recent recruitment drive yields something...

June 30, 2008 11:51 PM

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