A1.1 SUPPLEMENTAL Microsoft^® Office Excel^® FILES

This book is supported by a website that contains supplementary files. Specifically, the website contains a collection of Excel files corresponding to all of the spreadsheet exhibits in the book. This collection is not intended merely for backup purposes: You are encouraged to open these files while reading the text and to explore them carefully. This exploration provides a hands-on feel for the text’s examples, and the files potentially serve as templates for other model-building efforts.

A second collection of Excel files contains data sets for selected end-of-chapter exercises and cases. The data sets are provided for situations in which it would be tedious to enter all the data into an Excel file for the purpose of working on the exercise.

Some of the chapters and cases contain references to an existing spreadsheet model. The website also contains Excel files for these models.

The website can be found at the following location: http://faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/optimization-modeling/

A1.2 ANALYTIC SOLVER PLATFORM FOR EDUCATION SOFTWARE

Purchasers of this book may download a powerful, Windows-based software package called Analytic Solver Platform for Education (ASPE) that was developed by the same team that created Excel’s Solver. ASPE combines two software programs, Risk Solver Platform for Education (RSPE) and XLMiner for Education (XLME). XLME contains algorithms for data mining and is not relevant to the material in this book. Among its other capabilities,¹ RSPE contains algorithms for optimization that substantially enhance the capabilities of Excel’s Solver but use a different user interface. However, any model built for use with Excel’s Solver is compatible with RSPE and can typically be solved and analyzed more efficiently with RSPE than with Excel’s Solver. Details on the installation and use of ASPE can be found online (at the book’s website) in Appendix 4.

Once this software is installed, a new Risk Solver Platform tab appears in Excel, with its own ribbon of commands. Under Premium Solver Platform mode, a Premium Solver Platform tab appears instead.² For our purposes, these tabs contain the equivalent optimization capabilities. As in all matters involving software, the user should be aware of the copyright privileges and restrictions that apply to the use of RSPE.

A1.3 OPENSOLVER SOFTWARE

Excel’s Solver and RSPE impose restrictions on the size of problems that can be solved. One alternative for tackling larger models than these add-ins permit is to use OpenSolver, which provides a link between models built in Excel and a web-based optimization package. OpenSolver relies on a different user interface than either Excel’s Solver or ASPE, but the interface is not hard to master. Details on the use of OpenSolver can be found online (at the book’s website) in Appendix 5.