Recipe Database in excel?

[gijimbo]

As the subject states, I'm trying to make a recipe database in an excel document.

Normally with excel making a database is as simple as listing all the header data categories and making each record fill a row beneath the header. However what if there are multiple items in a single record that fit under the same category? For instance, in my case I want to list ingredients and their corresponding quantities but each recipe has a different number of ingredients. Every database I've made in excel before has had one value for each category in a record. Would I just comma separate the individual ingredients in the same cell? Would I then have to separate the amounts of each ingredient in the same order in another cell? How do I make this easy to search? If this was how I did it, then there would be maybe half a dozen header categories and some really big record values. This tells me that there's probably a better way to go about doing it.

I've just done a pretty good amount of googling and from what I've seen, most people avoid using excel for databases like these. I'm finding that many people are using access for this but I do not have access.

Is there any hope for me accomplishing this with excel? If so how would you do it?

 

[mikerickson]

I would use column headers

Dish Ingredient1Name Ingredient1Amount Ingredient1Name Ingredient2Amount

 

[gijimbo]

Wow thanks for the quick reply!

So you're saying, pick some number of ingredients that would be unlikely to be reached (say 20 or 25) and just fill them from left to right until I've gone through all the ingredients for each record?

That doesn't sound too bad.

I also have a "meal types" category that gets filled with stuff like dinner, chicken, Chinese, oven, etc. Would you do the same thing with this? If so how could I just search for one of these items on another sheet and return all the records that list that item under one of their "meal types" fields? Although my list above could be categorized individually with headers like meat type, ethnicity, cook type, meal time... I would prefer to just classify them all as "meal types".

 

[mikerickson]

If you have a meal type column you could AutoFilter on that column.