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Excel is just reactive programming. One thing that I always thought was missing was the ability to do looping until a condition is met in Excel. It’s actual very possible if you enable “iterative calculation” in the settings. This will allow you to walk data structures and perform complex calculations until you reach a goal.



Goal seek does this. It is a built in capability.


Both are built in but goal seek is limited in what can be done in the loop, and doesn’t use the in between steps in the seek.

Here’s a simple excel for loop with iterative calculation.

https://access-excel.tips/excel-iterative-calculation/

Here’s an example from chemical engineering of iterative calc. https://www.aiche.org/chenected/2017/03/excel-tip-6-use-exce...

There’s also an evolutionary and linear solvers for optimization problems, but that’s again something that’s more of an add in.


But you have to use it manually. You could make a macro and automate it, but it would be nice to have function that is built-in.




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