Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool for solving problems in many disiplines. It does, however, have its limitations; there are simply some problems that should not be solved in Excel. This is the first post in a new series in which we ignore these shortcomings and push Excel to its limits to solve problems that it was never meant for.

Microsoft Excel is an incredibly powerful and easy to use tool for data analysis and OR. In this post, I introduce a highly generalised and complex coverage problem and walk through my solving process; from formulation, to model-building.

Using an old number-pad mobile phone to send a text has to be one of the most strenuous and irritating tasks of the first world. In this post - although far too late to be of any use - I attempt to optimise the layout used on these phones to increase typing efficiency for a range of European languages.