Bin Packing Too Many Features

My girlfriend has been struggling with an interesting little problem lately. She was asked to determine the optimal distribution of medicine boxes and bottles over a set of adaptable cabinets; under volume as well as weight constraints. Not an easy task for a computer scientist; much less for a hospital pharmacist in training.

After describing the problem to me last night I (unhelpfully) mumbled that “this sounds like a variable sized bin packing problem to me, you can’t solve the kind of thing in Excel, you probably need an LP solver”.

Apparently I was wrong. It already seemed obvious to me that Excel suffers from a severe case of feature bloat, but this is just absurd.