Monthly Archives: October 2018

Setting the To value: cell in Excel’s Goal Seek to a Cell Reference

Sadly, it took awhile to “figure” this out. I was trying to solve a set of equations in Excel. I had one equation in one cell, say B1, that had a dependency on the value in A1. I had the second equation in cell C1 that also has a dependency on A1. I wanted to set cell B1 equal to CELL C1 by changing cell A1. You can’t do this with Excel’s Goal Seek feature, the To value: has to be a number.

The solution of course, was to create a third cell, D1, with the formula “= B1 – C1”. When those two cells are equal, as I wanted, D1 = 0. So now you can ask Goal Seek to solve the set of equations by setting cell D1 to value 0 by changing cell A1.

Yay!

pydotplus on macOS

I’ve been playing around with SciKit-Learn’s decision tree regression function. In one of the examples I was working on, they provided a demo script to print out a jpg of the decision tree. Cool! Unfortunately, my system didn’t have pydotplus installed. I’m using Anaconda, so issuing the following command took care of that issue:

conda install -c conda-forge pydotplus

However, when attempting to run again, this produced and error stating that the GraphViz executable could not be found. Ugh. Luckily, a quick trip to Homebrew took care of that issue:

brew install graphviz

Voila!