Every year, over one hundred Industrial and Systems Engineering at Ohio State students take courses that teach them the basics of linear and integer programming. Currently, students in these courses are taught to use a built in Excel solver or CPLEX using the LP or MPS file formats. These formats make it frustrating for students to create, modify, and debug mathematical programs. This frustration can prevent students from learning. This paper suggests the use of a high-level Excel specification format that is easier to use and more powerful than the formats that are currently taught. An Excel add-in was created to convert this new file format into an industry standard format. The new format and conversion program have many features to help students create, modify, read, and debug their models. Each section of the model has a column for a description and many different ways to add comments and notes exist. In addition, all of Excel’s features can be used to derive the end model. Finally, an error checker that gives specific feedback and suggestions for fixing errors is built into the file converter. The new format still needs to be extensively tested and some features are yet to be added. In addition, testing should be done to determine how the use of the new format influences the learning of mathematical programming.