What you need to do next is add the columns you need as part of your Solver equation. Hopefully you now have something in your Excel that looks like this: I typically use 30 days of data – you can go with more or less suited to your need, just remember to be consistent when working back to daily amounts later on. Rate, and Lost Impression Share due to Budget (Search, Display or both depending on which types of campaign you have). The first thing you’ll need to do is download a campaign report from AdWords that includes columns for Avg. Now we have the general housekeeping out of the way, let’s move onto using Solver to give you some awesomely optimized daily budgets. On Mac you should find it in the ‘Tools’ menu (see picture):
Here’s a link to the Microsoft Office instructions for how to get it running. From here you should be able to find the Solver plugin and set it live. To add it, go to your Excel options and select ‘Add Ins’. In my case it was already installed and located on the ‘Data’ tab of my ribbon. Not all of you will have Solver installed on your version of Excel. Second, I’m using a Mac and Excel 2011 to show you this – it runs a little differently on every version of Excel but most answers on where to find specifics can be found using Google. First, if you are consistently budget limited, you might consider using lower bids to maximize the number of clicks you get within your budget, rather than just changing around you daily budgets.
Then, at the end of the month, just cancel the trial and buy whichever one works best for you - although you might also want to consider sticking with the subscription for a couple of months before buying: the next version of Office is scheduled for release in June.Before we go any further let me add a couple of caveats.
I know you said you don't like Office 365, but you could sign up for the 1 month free trial, install it both on your Mac and in the VM and see for yourself how they work.
To me, running Excel in a VM sounds like way too much of a hassle, but I can't speak to your specific requirements. However, Excel 2016 has 64-bit support, so it should be able to make use of all that RAM, and I believe the interface is more consistent with its Windows counterpart now (but don't quote me on that).
Older versions of Excel for Mac had a bad rep for a couple of reasons, including interface inconsistency (I've always found using the VB editor in Excel 2011 a pain) and more recently, lack of 64-bit support. Solver has apparently been included in the Mac version since Excel 2011.
Office 2008 dropped VB support (because of the transition from PowerPC to Intel, I believe), but it returned in Office 2011. I haven't played with LibreOffice in forever, nor have I done much with Numbers but I suspect they are very weak compared to Excel. I'm also open to the possibility of non-Excel apps for Solver and spreadsheet function. Partially because it's free, and partially because I don't think I need any advanced features and it's probably lighter weight than the rest.Īny thoughts on using the Windows version of Excel, within Virtual Box, on a 32GB RAM machine, versus using the Mac Office 2015 version? I'm not sure how easy or hard it will be to transfer files between VirtualBox VM and OS X since I haven't used it with Windows. I'm also leaning towards VirtualBox rather than Parallels, Bootcamp, or VMWare. I'm also leaning towards a non-subscription based version of Excel, since I dislike the Office 365 model.
I'm leaning towards Windows 7 since I read Windows 10 is a privacy nightmare. I picked up a new iMac with 32GB of RAM so I should be able to run a virtual machine with ease. Not sure if Solver is in the Mac version or not or what features the Mac version lacks. From my limited research, it seems that the Mac Office 2015 Excel is still not as good as the Windows version. It's now 2017 and I'm considering a part-time job switch that will turn me into an excel power user again, that needs Solver functionality. I think I resorted to running Mac Excel 2004 at the time, which I believe had it in. I believe it was the Visual Basic module that it lacked, so you could't do Solver functions. The Mac version at the time, 2008 I believe, was pretty bad compared to the Windows version. I used to be an excel power user about a decade ago.