Small demo: Run a GAMS model from Excel.
Some VBA code is used to locate the GAMS system, launch GAMS and provide a log window.
When visiting clients, whether commercial companies or government agencies and other institutions, I am always impressed with the critical role Excel plays in running their business. I rarely see optimization applications where Excel is not in some way involved e.g. for data entry, reporting, ad-hoc data, etc. Having said this, I prefer to do more complicated analysis outside Excel, e.g. in GAMS or R. Developing models in Excel is usually not very easy and quite error prone. On the other hand I have seen users do quite complex things in Excel (but I have also seen many cases where I could not reproduce Excel results, usually because it is so easy to make copy-paste errors in Excel formulas).
Some VBA code is used to locate the GAMS system, launch GAMS and provide a log window.
When visiting clients, whether commercial companies or government agencies and other institutions, I am always impressed with the critical role Excel plays in running their business. I rarely see optimization applications where Excel is not in some way involved e.g. for data entry, reporting, ad-hoc data, etc. Having said this, I prefer to do more complicated analysis outside Excel, e.g. in GAMS or R. Developing models in Excel is usually not very easy and quite error prone. On the other hand I have seen users do quite complex things in Excel (but I have also seen many cases where I could not reproduce Excel results, usually because it is so easy to make copy-paste errors in Excel formulas).