Mac Mojo: The Office for Mac Team Blog

What's that?

What's that you say?

You said you want to spend your Labor Day weekend creating exotic, elaborate optimization models with Excel 2008?

You said, "If only Solver was available for Excel 2008, I could get the jump on that crazy capacity-planning problem for my fall MBA class!"

Well, do I have some great news for you.

Just in time for the long weekend (and a little ahead of the promised "mid-September" delivery date), our friends at Frontline Systems have released Solver for Excel 2008. You can get Solver as a free download from the Frontline Web site (www.solver.com/mac); which, at less than 2 MB, should be a lightning-fast experience for just about everyone.

(Please note that Solver for Excel 2008 requires Excel 12.1.2, so if you have yet to update your copy of Office 2008, now would be a good time to run Microsoft AutoUpdate or visit the download page on Mactopia.)

My previous post on Solver and Excel 2008 contained the 411 about how to install and use this new version of Solver, so I won't re-post that here. Instead, I thought people might want to know some of the system and support information for the product.

Solver for Excel 2008:

Runs on PowerPC or Intel systems;
Works with Mac OS X 10.4.11 ("Tiger"), Mac OS X 10.5.4 ("Leopard") or later;
Is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch and Swedish;
Requires Excel 2008 v. 12.1.2 or later.

I've been using Solver for Excel 2008 during its development, and I think Solver users will be delighted with what Frontline has created. The Mac Excel team has been working closely with our colleagues at Frontline for the past several months, and I'm confident that the product they've produced will make a lot of our mutual customers very, very happy.

Happy downloading, everybody!

Posted by: Gavin Shearer in Office, excel, Announcements, Office 2008, Excel 2008

4 Comments

Comments | Who's Blogging This

[njw7]

njw7

Sep 10, 2008

4:57pm

A step in the right direction ......

Glad to hear the news, and even happier to download the solver - though I'm a little surprised that it has to be stand-alone.

Now if you'd only do something about the analysis add-in that was also so thoughtlessly dropped from this version you'd take yet another important step on your rehabilitation.

[Westby, Eric]

Eric Westby

Aug 30, 2008

5:58pm

Thanks for this.

As a reluctant MBA more interested in managing people than building statistical models, I nevertheless thank you for this, without which Excel 2008 would have been useless to me. It's still disappointing that VBA was so thoughtlessly abandoned in Excel 2008, but this eases the pain somewhat.

[aardvarksfly]

aardvarksfly

Aug 31, 2008

8:10am

Microsoft Publsiher, anyone?

Help! I am writing a publication with a colleague who has Mac and I, of course, have Windows. I started in Microsoft Publisher 2007 thinking it would be an easy thing for my friend to update his computer with Publisher so we could work on files together.

Am I right in that there is not a Microsoft Publisher for Mac OS?

If so, does anyone have a suggestion of a desktop publishing program that would work with both of us?

Thank you!

[billMo]

billMo

Sep 04, 2008

7:01am

Problem with Office 2008 Update???

Today, I accepted the "Critical" patch for MS Office 2008 for Mac. After successfully loading, I tried to launch Excel 2008 and it failed...repeatedly. I rebooted my MacBook (2.4Ghz Penryn / 4Gb RAM) and tried again...and again...and, oh you get the idea.

Any ideas? Has anyone else had this issue?

Happened mid-afternoon CDT on Wednesday, Sept 3, 2008.

No other Office apps affected other than Excel 2008.

(PS: I had been using Excel earlier in the day with no problems.)