Thoughts on Solver and What-if analysis?

Find result is incredibly useful for well... finding results. You can end up in cases when you for example need to zero something out, so "find result" is a faster way than inputting numbers manually. In addition it can be used to make relatively simple (but also: easy to understand) pricing / investment models: the tool is very good for what it does and you can run it with a click of a button; no need to use Solver or VBA.

Solver is an improved "find result", because it is much more powerful. Once again it is a really nice thing to have because it works out of the box. Unfortunately it comes with its own set of issues: most users will be unhappy that it provides only 1 solution (that's why many use macros instead to try to brute force things, but many things simply cannot be brute forced), has limits on number of restrictions (I think there are 2 alternatives, one is called OpenSolver and I forgot other's name) and the nature of models themselves means that sometimes tricks need to be used to account for some features.

/r/excel Thread