The Answer Report, which is available whenever a solution has been found, provides basic information about the decision variables and constraints in the model. It also gives you a quick way to determine which constraints are “binding” or satisfied with equality at the solution, and which constraints have slack. The Answer Report records the message that appeared in the Solver Results dialog, the Solving method used to solve the problem, Solver Option settings, and statistics such as the time, iterations and subproblems required to solve the problem.
First shown are the objective function and decision variables, with their original value and final values. Next are the constraints, with their final cell values; a formula representing the constraint; a “status” column showing whether the constraint was binding or non-binding at the solution; and the slack value – the difference between the final value and the lower or upper bound imposed by that constraint.
When creating a report, Solver constructs the entries in the Name column by searching for the first text cell to the left and the first text cell above each variable (changing) cell and each constraint cell. If you lay out your Solver model in tabular form, with text labels in the leftmost column and topmost row, these entries will be most useful. The formatting for the Original Value, Final Value and Cell Value is “inherited” from the formatting of the corresponding cell in the Solver model.