To think that I am a very sad human being but I'm going to ask anyway....

[stillawip]

Hi everyone,
I have lots of cookbooks, and whenever I have something to use up in the fridge, I would like to be able to go straight to a recipe in one of my books that uses that ingredient. Or, if I want to cook a particular dish (say apple pie), I want to be able to find out quickly which of my books have a recipe for apple pie in, rather than trawling them all. So, being the sad human being that I am, some years ago I started to make an index on Microsoft Excel of all the recipes in my favourite books, and then categorising them under appropriate headings (so for apple pie it would appear if I looked under 'Apples', 'Desserts - Sweet pies' and 'Desserts - Fruit' ) thus making it easy for me to search. The list has now grown like Topsy & I would love to know how to automate what I am doing a bit more, but I don't know what that would be called!! How could I do that?

Do I need a catalogue function? An index? A drop-down list? Any ideas?!

YABU - you are a very sad human being and you should go & lie down in a darkened room for at least a year.
YANBU - this is a genius idea & here's my suggestion

Here you go op - https://www.howtogeek.com/702718/how-to-sort-and-filter-data-in-excel/

What?? Build an app??? I mean, you’re very kind but you are SERIOUSLY overestimating my computer skills!!! 😘

That’s very helpful, thank you - I will have a read ❤️

If you PM me I can help you. I'm an IT trainer.

I'm trying to envisage your current sheet op... is it simply a list of books and the dish names, or have you got columns for each ingredient? If so how do you list each ingredient for each dish?

This is right up my street But i have a core of several favourite recipes and tend to remember what's in them and what books they are in as I've made them thousands of times!

This is what you need OP, a professional!

Omg we speak the same love language. Marry me?????

I would use one note instead,
1 section per book
1 Page per recipe

Take a photo of the page with the recipe on it too
You could copy or embed your excel sheet too.

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking? To search your data more quickly or to speed up populating it.

if the former so you can, for example, just retrieve those recipes that use apples, then filtering your data is v easy as a pp said. But it slightly depends on how you’ve structured your spreadsheet.

Or it’s easy to resort alphabetically.

And I am pretty shit at Excel.

Genius. I can’t help much, but I am cheering you on.

I’ve just learned to use Sharepoint lists, which are quite awesome, and may be what you need. I assume you’re using your spreadsheet like a fancy table and don’t use formulae or anything?

I am thinking filters won't work for say apple pie as column 1 May have apple or for another recipie you decide flour is ingredient 1.

I google ’beetroot, apples, celery, recipe’

Never fails.

OK, so I will try and attach a screenshot of one of the pages....I think what I'm asking is, when I type in the name of a recipe, is there a way I can easily select all the relevant categories (second column) & my computer magically create all the multiple entries for that recipe & put them in those categories? Rather than me having to type 5 lines per recipe, each one for a different category? Does that make sense?

Yes, but I want recipes from my own books, rather than random ones from the internet...no idea why, but it just seems like a waste of money to have bought all these books & not use them!! 😂

Well, it depends on exactly how you've built your spreadsheet, but assuming you have the ingredients in separate columns you would be able to do it. But a PP's statement about having to be a hardcore excel user makes me wonder if trying it will have you cursing me (I've put in enough all nighters struggling with excel for it to be second nature to me, but I'll have a meltdown when other software packages won't do what I want them to, so no blame there)

I second Access.

We used to use it at work, but a less than literate manage made us change to excel. I’m just waiting for the day it crashes and the data is unrecoverable to say I told you so!

The info in column B should be in separate columns.

Oh my goodness! Have you seen the new Samsung fridge? It’s absolutely ridiculous. It scans the inside of your fridge and gives you a recipe with the ingredients that are about to expire!!

I'm a bit confused, why do you have multiple entries of the recipes?

I would have separate columns for each of the categories, instead of having them all in the same column. Then you can sort by category/ingredient by simply sorting by the relevant column, and it will have all the recipes which contain that ingredient/are in that category all together.

Could that work for you?

Yeah I got rid of all my books 🤣
I buy them, read them for a couple of months, then pass them along.

What @CatherinedeBourgh said. You need to a more granular taxonomy.

name of recipe, book, page number, type (eg meat, fish, dessert), and then maybe 3 tags like apples, pastry, pie

If it were me I'd probably keep using filters.

Select the recipe I want in column a, then in column b you can select which categories you want to narrow it down to.

The result would be all, for example, all 'apple sauce' recipes in 'dessert category'.

I would use conditional formatting for categories, too. So that for all desserts the row is highlighted one colour (say blue), all main courses, pink, etc.

Then I'd see at a glance what options there are.

I feel like what you need is a database with "tags" so i.e. you would take Apple and Blackberry Crumble and you'd tag it with "dessert" "hot" "apple" and "blackberry" or whatever.

Then when you searched "apple" everything with that tag would come back.

No idea how you actually set one of those up mind...

Thanks op! You need a relational database, I think Access would do the trick.

Two old fashioned suggestions:
Post it flags on the pages of the actual books and
and a proper recipe box with favourite recipes written out on cards. The boxes come with card dividers with simple categories written on them.
I'm using my mum's and I've added to it.