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

I agree with the pp who said you need to split out the single column with lots of different categories, so you have one category for type of recipe (pudding/side dish/sauce etc), one for subtype (mousse, icecream/sorbet, pie etc) and one for key ingredient. Then you can filter one or many columns as required.
As pp said, the way to do that is to use the text to column tool, splitting by ":"

I'm with you completely OP.

I'm from a family of harmless nerds, and we love a spreadsheet.

My mum has been tracking the weather on a spreadsheet for the best part of 20 years.

My sister has one for all the books she's read since she was in her late teens. She's over 40yo now.

I'm house hunting, and have a spreadsheet of houses I've seen, ranked and colour coded!

You need to rationalise your categories and only have one term in each drop down item (e.g. “carrots” “aubergines” “ham”). Copy the column across to the right x however many ingredients you’re likely to find in the recipes and also want to search for (no salt for instance, no-one has leftover salt 😊).

Then you can then use the filters to select, say, “carrots” “aubergines” “ham” in turn in each of the first three columns and this will return only the recipes that include these three ingredients.

Conversely, you can write the book and the recipe in one column e.g. Mary Berry Easy CookBook Potato Galette because there’s no need to separate these terms.

Undoubtedly Powerapp is a better idea but getting to grips with terms in Excel is a good way to get your head around the whole concept.

Oh hang on, I was on a completely different premise there. But the same principles apply. One term for each thing you want to search for. Don’t be afraid of multiple columns!

Trouble with excel is that Apple may be ingredient 1 2 or 3. So you'd have to search all 3 ingredients column for it.

Excel less good when you have lots of "sane type of things" to include against one entry.

Lorks, you are all so clever!!!! Maybe I should start a Spreadsheet Appreciation Post 🤣🤣

Yeah, that’s why you’d need multiple columns with the same drop downs. I am a total amateur though. Undoubtedly there’s a better way! Playing with Excel is such fun though. 🤣

Oh it really is - every day is a school day for me! 🤣

Yeah, that’s why you’d need multiple columns with the same drop downs.

That's why I personally would choose to have multiple row for the same recipe instead.

If you decided to move from a spreadsheet, I wonder if a desktop wiki software be one way to achieve what you want to do?

I'm thinking you could make a page per book, with subpages for each recipe. The recipe page would be tagged with keywords that you can then search for when looking for a recipe. The additional benefit here is that you could easily record your own notes and comments on each recipe, if needed.

I might have misunderstood what you want to do but thought it was worth suggesting. I used to use one called Zim, for organising study notes.

I would also like to steal this idea please. Your house sounds like such a lovely, happy home.

You can type into Internet, recipes using X, Y, Z
It will suggest some recipes

Haven’t rtft.

There’s an app called Eat My Books that’s meant to sort all of this out apparently.

Please come and do me the same!

I so badly want to be like you! I have half begun lists and jottings across several notebooks 😳

There's an ap for this.

I can't find it on iPhone? Any ideas what it's called there?

I’m thinking of doing something similar tbh!

I think it’s called Eat Your Books

@Asshewheelshereheelbarrow I tired that and no luck 😔

Oh apologies! Serves me right as I haven’t rtft!

I don’t think your sad at all can’t help with what you are asking.

i am no great cook enjoy eating though. When I have things that I don’t know what to do with I just search the internet for ideas using my ingredients and see if anything comes that that I like the sound of.

But if you'd RTFT you'd see that the OP doesn't want to do that. She's creating a catalogue/database of her own cookery books.

I'm in such a sad mood today and this thread has warmed my heart. OP, are you in need of a new best friend? I would like to apply.

Paprika is a good app. You can type in or import recipes. Assign them to multiple categories. You can inventory your pantry as well, so it tells you what you need to buy.