That is, we start with nothing other than our Tools, then proceed to “build” a simulation. We would like to emphasize that when we start a simulation, we usually start with a blank spreadsheet.
#INSTALL SOLVER EXCEL 2016 MAC PROBLEMS WINDOWS#
So it is with our XLLs-they are specifically written for Excel for Windows and will not work for Excel for Mac. Because most programs have their own special way of internally representing data, the DLLs which come with various applications are specifically written for those applications. Like it or not, Windows is still the dominant operating system, holding about 91% of the desktop market share. In recent years, we have used the XLW ∗ project, which is a C++ wrapper for the Excel C Application Programming Interface (API), making the XLL development significantly easier. Programming with the Excel SDK is a tedious and error-prone task that requires specialised skills and experience.
#INSTALL SOLVER EXCEL 2016 MAC PROBLEMS SOFTWARE#
The Microsoft Excel 2007 Software Developer’s Kit (SDK) contains the necessary header and library files to build an XLL.
We also discovered that we could not solve some problems without using this approach, because we reached memory limitations in Excel. Furthermore, we find that coding in C is more efficient for complicated functions. Although we frequently prototype our functions in VBA, we have implemented the Tools in the C language, because the execution is much faster particularly for the analysis of large data sets. Many programmers who write Add-In functions for Excel prefer to do so completely in C or C++ rather than in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) for any number of good reasons.
Once we could see the whole problem, the answer was obvious!Īn XLL is an Add-In for Microsoft Excel that you can build with any compiler that supports building dynamic link libraries (DLLs). Finally, it proved easy to graphically examine the predicted concentrations for different starting estimates and to examine every value in each matrix used in the calculation of the extended least squares objective function during the optimisation process. Secondly, we set up a mixed-effects analysis (based on our XLMEM code). Firstly, we wrote an ordinary differential equation solver for Excel in C to implement the rather complicated PK model. It proved ‘easy’ to find the reason why with Excel.
With a spreadsheet implementation, you get to see the whole problem.įor example, on one occasion, we were struggling to understand why NONMEM was crashing with certain starting estimates. Using such programs, you see only the beginning and the end of a calculation and miss out on the middle. Can a business program perform the types of calculations that are required in PK/PD simulation and modeling? The answer, of course, is ‘yes!’ With many software programs you prepare the data, run the program, then wait while it performs some magic and spits out the result. Microsoft Excel was developed to compete in the lucrative business software market, so you may wonder if the program is suitable for pharmacokinetic (PK) pharmacodynamic (PD) simulation and modeling.