When Excel Solver can't handle your routing problem anymore
No add-in No row limit No cost A free web tool for vehicle routing with time windows and capacity — the problem Excel's Solver was never built to scale to.
Nothing to install. Upload a workbook of stops, get back routes and a map. Runs in your browser, not your spreadsheet.
Open the route optimizer Download the sample workbookWhere the Excel Solver approach breaks down
I built VRP models in Excel for twenty years using the built-in Solver and, later, SolverStudio (a plugin that embeds Python solver code inside a workbook). Both are genuinely useful for small problems. Both hit a wall the same way:
| What happens | Why |
|---|---|
| Solver just stops improving, or times out | Excel's built-in Solver uses a simplex/GRG engine meant for smooth optimization problems, not the combinatorial search a VRP actually needs. Past a handful of stops it's guessing, not solving. |
| SolverStudio needs an install | It's a real Python bridge, but it means a plugin, a Python environment, and a workbook that only works on the machine it was set up on. |
| Formula-based "solvers" (VLOOKUP chains, nearest-neighbor macros) | These are heuristics dressed up as optimization. They can look reasonable and still be 20-30% worse than an actual solve, with no way to know by how much. |
| File size and row count | A VRP model's constraint matrix grows fast with stop count. Excel was not built to hold that many decision variables live. |
What replaces it
This tool still reads and writes Excel — you upload a .xlsx workbook and get one back — but the actual solving happens with Google OR-Tools' routing library, a real combinatorial solver built for exactly this class of problem, running on a server instead of inside a spreadsheet cell.
Same workbook workflow
Four sheets: locations, vehicles, parameters, solution. If you've built a routing input sheet before, this will look familiar.
Real drive times
Routes are built on actual road distances from OSRM, not straight-line estimates a spreadsheet formula would use.
Time windows and capacity
Hard constraints — a stop's delivery window and a vehicle's load limit — handled properly, not approximated.
No plugin, no environment
Nothing to install. It runs the same way on any machine with a browser.
How to start
1. Get the template
Download the sample workbook — same four-sheet shape described above.
2. Swap in your stops
Replace the sample rows with your own locations, demands, and time windows.
3. Upload and run
The solve happens server-side. You get back a route map and a results workbook.
Why it is free
I'm an operations research analyst — twenty years building optimization models for manufacturers and airlines, most of them stuck inside Excel workbooks nobody outside the team could open. I'm converting them into free web tools one at a time and writing up how each conversion went, including this one — the actual porting work, C# and VBA into Python, real bugs included.
Questions, or a workbook format that doesn't fit? Email mario@kindoflost.com. I read them.
Other routing use cases
Same solver and engine, different worked example — each of these is written for its own setting. Start from whichever is closest to yours.
- Food banks & food rescue — Home-delivery and donor-pickup routing for volunteer drivers.
- Spreadsheet-in, spreadsheet-out — Upload an Excel file of stops, get back a routed workbook and a map.
- Open-source vehicle routing — What’s actually free — the Google OR-Tools engine behind this and most routing tools.
- Last-mile delivery routing — Parcel and package delivery, per-van capacity and time windows.
- Field service routing — Technician appointment windows, job duration, and per-tech capacity.
- Delivery route planner — For small businesses running their own delivery routes.
- Fleet route optimization — Multi-vehicle trucking and distribution fleets.
- Sales rep route planner — Outside sales reps and merchandisers visiting client sites.
- Courier routing software — Same-day and multi-stop courier services.
- Waste & recycling collection routing — Truck capacity and collection time windows.
Related
- Route optimizer — the tool itself, with the full parameter reference.
- VRP spreadsheet solver — more on the workbook-in, workbook-out workflow.
- Open-source vehicle routing — what's actually open source here, and what isn't.
- Kind-of-Lost — write-ups of each model, including how this one was built.