Complete Newbie Here, Grocery List Help

I got the general gist of what the original programmer was trying to do with this. I decided to use that layout, but my own design.

This program isn’t complete, but I’d like you to perform some QA on it before I go further. What the program is not doing is picking up the side dishes. I have to “extract” the program I got that does the main dishes and make it more general, but before I do that, I want to make sure it does what it’s supposed to do.

Also to be able to test it, I had to remove a lot of data. The program was using ingredients that were not in the database. So I cut it back so we would have data integrity.

Start on the Recipes Sheet. This is where you will enter in the dishes and whether they are main or side (this cell is validated) and how many people the recipe serves and an optional link to the recipe itself.

Then go to the Ingredients Sheet. Enter in the dish (this cell is validated from the entries on the Recipe Sheet), the amount (a whole positive number), the unit of measure (this cell is validated from a list on the Loolups Sheet (Column A). You can add to this list. Don’t mess with the other information on this sheet. You can hide this sheet when not using it.

Continue by entering the ingredient name and then how to round to the nearest unit. That is, if you are measuring a cup, you can measure to the nearest ¼ of a cup. On the other hand, you are probably not going to use ¼ can or ¼ loaf. Some things come in whole units.

The program uses this information to round to the nearest unit of measure. So it might come out to be 1.2674321 tablespoons of something, but it will round to the nearest 0.25 tablespoons or 1.25 but since you can always do with more, but never do with less, if the rounded value is less than the required value, it gets “bumped up a notch.” In this case another ¼ tablespoon.

There is a fallacy here: \ the combined plan may call for a total of 5.5 tablespoons of salt. Stores don’t sell salt by the tablespoon. Also you probably have all the salt you need on hand.

Once you have these two tables filled in, then you can go to the Meal Plan sheet. I’ll give you a button in the future to clear this out so you can start with a fresh sheet.

The date is validated to a date later than 30 days ago. I could just as well validate it to a date later than or equal to today. Let me know what you would like.

Serves is limited to a whole positive number. This is the number of people you want to serve with this meal. This information is combined with the number of people the recipe serves to determine what you need. If the recipe serves 4 people and you need 1 cup of milk, but you are now serving 6, the program will calculate the need for 1.5 cups of milk.

The main dish is validated to those dishes you mark as main dishes in the recipes.

The side dishes are validated to those dishes you mark as side dishes in the recipes. As I mentioned above, I’m not looking at these right now. I will add them after we work the bugs out of this version.

Then you can go to the shopping sheet. Click on the Compile List Button and everything should compute. That’s another advantage of limiting the data; it makes testing easier. It looks like I got the proper rollups.

The list should print nicely in portrait mode.

Play with it. Try to break it. Let me know what needs fixin’