In the Add-Ins available box, select the Solver Add-in check box, and then click OK.Click Add-Ins, and then in the Manage box, select Excel Add-ins.Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Excel Options.*The solver add-in can be installed with these steps For the format, you can add whatever you want (bold, italic, green fill, etc).Īnother easy way to find the important rows is to sort column B Z->A, and all the 1's will come to the top. In the formula, enter '=$B1=1' (no quotes) which will evaluate to true if the corresponding row in the B column is 1. Select all of the cells you want to format and from (Home tab)>(Styles group)>Conditional formatting>New Rule select 'Use a formula to determine which cells to format'. If the solver is taking a long time, you can help it out by removing rows that obviously won't work (total is in dollars, and only one row has nonzero cents)īonus: You can have excel automatically highlight the cells that you're looking for by adding conditional formatting to those cells. The numbers that are part of the subset you're looking for will have a 1 in the B column This restricts the values of these cells to 0 (removing the corresponding A cell from the sum) or 1 (adding the corresponding A cell to the sum). Add a constraint to the cells that can be changed.In the 'By Changing Cells' enter "$B$1:$B$100" (no quotes, and it may be necessary to initialize these values to 0 yourself).For 'Equal To:' select 'Value of:' and enter the desired value.The target cell should be obvious ($C$1 for this example).Select Open the solver (Data tab, Analysis group).This will calculate the sum of A1*B1+A2*B2+.etc In the target cell, enter the formula "=SUMPRODUCT(A1:A100,B1:B100)" (no quotes).Designate a cell to hold the result (C1 for this example) - this is the target cell, and a column that excel can use for scratch-work (B1:B100 for this example).The following steps worked for me in Excel 20.