Teaching Note—Analytic Visualization of Solver Output

Abstract

Data visualization is an essential component of modern analytics, supporting communication and understanding. While data visualization has been explored extensively in the context of descriptive analytics and big data, its use in prescriptive analytics, specifically for explaining and interpreting optimization results, has largely been ignored. In this teaching note we describe how data visualization can be applied effectively to facilitate the communication and understanding of standard Excel Solver output reports in a simple, nontechnical fashion.