Excel Solver is used to solve optimization problems, which is like solving equations. In this tutorial, we will give a very simple example on how to use Excel Solver. Basic example Suppose your car is low on gasoline. The gasoline is $3/gallon. You have a budget of $50. How much gasoline can you buy? Of course, for a problem this simple, we do not even need a Solver to solve the problem. However, the purpose is to teach the users how to use Excel Solver, so we make the problem extremely simple. We have the following framework: Goal: maximize quantity of gasoline Relationship: cost=quantity * unit price Constraint: cost<=budget 1. In cell B1, we enter unit price "3", in cell B4, we enter the budget 50. In cell B2, we just enter an arbitrary number as the number of gallons. We entered 5. In cell B3, we enter the formula "=B1*B2" to let it be the cost, which equals to 15. 2. Click Solver under the Data menu. 3. A Solver dialog window pops up. In "Set objective...
Pivot table is a powerful tool to summarize data and examine data patterns in Excel. Suppose we have 200 rows of data from a farmer, which sells fruit (apple, banana, orange) and vegetable (carrot, spinach) to clients in the US or Canada market, like below: 1. Select Insert > PivotTable 2. Click on PivotTable, then select the data range and where to place the PivotTable. When selecting the data range, the header must be selected. 3. Drag "Category" to Row labels, "Item" to Column labels, "Amount" to Values, and at last, drag "Market" to Report Filter. Note: You can user different fields for filter, row label or column label, depending on your business logic. You do not have to fill all the 4 fields, even only dragging the "Amount" into the "Values" field still produces a nice PivotTable. Again, all depend on your business logic. 4. The result is below. Notice that some cells are blank in the PivotTable. The reason is obvio...
Excel has a very useful function convert numbers from one measure unit to another, for example, from Fahrenheit to Celsius, or from mile to kilometer. The function is CONVERT . For example, if we want to convert temperature 1.2 mile to kilometer, how to do it? One way is using the equation: 1 mile = 1.60934 kilometer If you do not know the conversion equation, you can just use the CONVERT function. Since kilometer is not a basic unit in the CONVERT function, you need to convert mile into meter first and then to kilometer. For example: =CONVERT(1.2,"mi","m") will turn mile into meters. If you divided the above number by 1000, you will get kilometer. =CONVERT(1.2,"mi","m")/1000 See the following figure for example. You can also convert kilometer into mile in a similar way. You first need to convert kilometer into meter, then use the CONVERT function. The formula is: =CONVERT(2.35*1000,"m","mi")
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