We are very excited to announce the release of OpenSolver for Google Sheets 2.0! This is a major update that brings many improvements to the Google Sheets addon:
- Support for one more than one model per workbook! Now, each sheet can have its own model. Use the sheet selector at the top of the sidebar to switch to the model for a sheet.
- Models can reference cells on different sheets! You can define models using ranges on any sheet in the workbook.
- Added a new solver: Cbc on NEOS! You can choose to either use the solver provided by Google, or the Cbc solver on the NEOS optimization cloud. Note that all problems submitted to NEOS become publicly available, please see the terms of use.
, and use the new Cbc solver to solve models on the NEOS cloud server. - Support for resuming incomplete solves! If the solve takes more than 6 minutes, it will be stopped before a solution is found. Now you can resume the solve from where you left off, allowing you to solve larger models than before.
There is more information about the Google Sheets addon here on the dedicated page.
If you already use the addon, the update will automatically roll out. If you haven’t used it before, you can try it out here:
Update on Google’s Linear Solver
Last week, Google made breaking changes to their LinearOptimizationService inside Google Sheets, which means that it currently is not functional at all, and so we can’t use it in OpenSolver to solve optimisation problems. We reported the issue to Google immediately, but it has not been fixed at the time of writing this post. In the meantime, you should use the Cbc solver via the NEOS server.
If you would like to see Google fix their solver faster, you can click the star on the issue page linked before. The more stars the issue gets, the faster they will fix the problem.
Migrating models from previous versions of OpenSolver
Due to supporting one model per sheet, we have had to make changes to how we store the OpenSolver models, and so your current models are not automatically loaded into the new version. To load in your old model, you can either redefine it manually, or use the “Import previous model” item in the menu. This will load in your previous model as the model for the currently selected sheet.
Please get in touch if you have problems with this feature, we want to make the transition as smooth as possible for everyone. You should also use the “Show previous model data” menu item to open a box with the model information for your sheet. Please include this when you get in touch so that we can diagnose the problem.
Feedback and Issues
OpenSolver for Google Sheets is younger and less mature than the Excel version, so does not yet have the full range of features as in the Excel version. There are also a lot of possibilities that are created by the online aspect of Google Sheets (such as sharing sheets and multiple users on a sheet at once). This means there are many new features to consider and add to the addon as it evolves over time.
If you have any feature requests or experience any problems while using it, please let us know either here or by using the “Report an Issue” button inside Google Sheets (you can find this in “Add-ons > OpenSolver > Help”). If you use “Report an Issue”, please make sure that you include your contact details, otherwise there is no way for us to follow up!
We are always interested to hear how you are using OpenSolver, and in particular if you find the Google Sheets version useful (because we don’t control the downloads, we have much less user information on the number of Google Sheets users). This allows us to balance the time we spend developing the Excel and Google Sheets versions according to user demand.
If you like the Google Sheets addon, please consider rating us in the store and/or leaving us a review, which will help other users find out about OpenSolver!