Hello,

There are some templates out there that do similar things. But if you want to roll your own, that's fine, too. Using only worksheet formulas, this might not be doable, or require very sophisticated, complex formulas.

It would be possible to write some VBA that processes the Meal plan book.

If you have an edition of Excel that includes Power Query, I'd opt for a Power Query solution and build your shopping list with a pivot table that is fed from data that Power Query gathers from the data input. Power query can easily combine the data from the Meal Plan with the data from the recipe sheets. I assume that the number of ingredients varies for each recipe. With proper data layout this can be a piece of cake (pun intentional) for Power Query.

(They're sheets, not books, by the way. The file is the workbook and the tabs are the worksheets)

So, which approach do you prefer?

cheers, teylyn