Simulating the real business cycle models is a popular topic
in first-year graduate courses on macroeconomics. Usually,
Maple and Matlab are used for this purpose, mainly because
they can be used both for solving and for simulating the
models. Strulik (2004) demonstrates that Excel can be used
both for solving and for simulating a standard RBC model.
In this paper, we propose a more elementary approach that
might be suitable for undergraduate courses. We illustrate
(i) how to solve a simple RBC model by hand and (ii) how
to use Excel to simulate the solution.