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motivated by the Mac's resurgence in the market

Yay! The resurgence is working!

I've always liked Solver and I would have been really angry if I had upgraded from Office 2004 and found it missing. Fortunately, Microsoft hasn't added anything useful to Word or Excel since the early 90's, so pretty much any version that runs on my hardware is sufficient. Down with bloatware!
 
For professional data plotting - error bars and everything else

Please give this freeware "Plot" a try:
http://plot.micw.eu/

Very professional-looking formatted graphs done at ease. The program has a very extensive Inspector, sure you can make the graph the way you want it to look, and you can do all the extropolation or best-fit very nicely.

All you need is just to export your data in columns as a text file (.csv?) from any spreadsheet programs - Excel, OpenOffice or Numbers!! Then import the file(s) into Plot. Another nice thing is that you can easily switch visible/invisible the sets of data you want to display from the data inspector.

Why do graphs in Excel? It's so clumsy and often it just gives an insufficient appearance!
 
Good news. Though it is a bit awkward to start an external app for Solver.

i havent downloaded it yet, so its not integrated into Excel? yet another .app in the Applcations folder i bet. oh well still awesome though. but i really could have used this during my Scientific Computing course last semester :rolleyes:.
 
i havent downloaded it yet, so its not integrated into Excel? yet another .app in the Applcations folder i bet. oh well still awesome though. but i really could have used this during my Scientific Computing course last semester :rolleyes:.

Yea, same here. I really would have needed it last semester ^^
 
Beyond

Thats a little beyond me. Not sure why I need coding in my excel document. Can I still make pie graphs? Thats all I need... delicious pie graphs.
 
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It is good to finally see this come around.
 
Still on Office 2004

...and it works great considering I haven't had to deal with the issues associated with working w/o VBA and the Solver...
It's a lifesaver considering I'm relegated to working on MS Office for Windows at work. Incidentally, we're still on the 2003 version, given our distaste for the current Windows iteration.

Cheers.
 
First Part: Off-topic observation about the company packages offered:

http://www.solver.com/matlabsdk.htm

Please. When I read plug-ins comparing themselves to Matlab I know someone in Marketing is overreaching.

http://www.solver.com/pricesdk.php

Why the hell would I buy an SDK to leverage much of what MatLab does when I can buy MatLab, with it's APIs to extend and do it for less?

Back On Topic for Linear Optimization:

Great for folks who don't need more than Linear Programming and want to hook it in for Excel.

Of course, they could use the Linear programming tools built into OpenOffice.org 3.0 for OS X Intel.

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8808

------- Additional comments from fst Wed Aug 6 08:23:58 +0000 2008 -------
Hi,

this Issue is fixed as the Solver is implemented.

The strange references problem is Issue 92030 .

Frank

------- Additional comments from fst Wed Aug 6 08:25:02 +0000 2008 -------
integrated in OOo3.o
 
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