My aim in this chapter is to introduce you to the famous Excel Solver. Together, we will start from activating the Excel add-in to solving the business problems you might encounter in your line of work. The Excel Solver will assume that you have some background in linear programming, thus making this an advanced topic. We will aim to concentrate on simple optimization problems and attempt to be as practical as possible. Where does this chapter fit into the data analysis life cycle? Well, the data analysis section, of course. This is the part that comes after you have prepared your data and you are ready for analysis. At this point, you should have a good understanding of your data and know what needs to be done with your data. In the past, I have used the Excel Solver to automate tedious and repetitive tasks. These tasks used to take several hours, but now they take under a minute. This was monumental for my department at that time and gave us...