Excel is a handy tool for keeping track of your favorite recipes. You can use it to record recipe ingredients and instructions together with a photo of the dish. You can then easily find your favorite recipes at any time.
This month we have a recipe tracking Excel worksheet for you. This worksheet helps you categorize your recipes and record all the details so everything is kept in one place. We’ll show you how to enter recipes, add categories and how to expand the worksheet so it will grow with your recipe collection. So how about grabbing a few recipes and let’s get started.
Visit http://www2.e-thisisit.com/files/Recipe tracker.xlsx to download the recipe tracker template. If prompted to Open or Save the worksheet, choose Open to open it automatically in Microsoft Excel. Choose File > Save As and save it to your My Documents folder with a name of your choice, we used My Recipes.
Click on each tab across the foot of the window to navigate around the worksheet. Notice that the first sheet contains instructions for completing the recipe details. The second one contains a list of recipes, then the next is a list of categories and finally you will see the individual recipe sheets.
Follow the instructions to complete the details for your first recipe – do this on the sheet called Empty Recipe 1. You will type a name for it, select a category for it and then complete all the details. Press Alt + Tab to make a new line when typing the instructions. You can add a photo and rename the sheet tab to match the recipe name.
When you are done, click the Recipe Contents sheet and you will see details of the recipe that you have added and the tags. Click in the rating list and select a star rating for the recipe from the Rating dropdown list. You can also type comments into the comments box. Other boxes are completed automatically for you from the recipe itself.
To add a new Category, click the Category Setup tab. Click in the cell below the last item in the list and type the new category name. Press Enter then arrow back up to select the cell you just typed. Press the Increase Indent button on the Home tab of the Ribbon twice to line up the text neatly.
With only five empty recipe sheets, you’ll run out of space quickly. Make sure to add new empty recipe sheets before you use up the last sheet. To do this, right click the last empty recipe sheet and choose Move or Copy, click the Create a Copy checkbox and then select Move to end option and click Ok.
A new empty recipe sheet will be created for you. Double click its name and type the correct number for it such as Empty Recipe 6. Click in cell E3 and type Empty Recipe 6 in the box. Return to the Recipe Contents list. Click in the last filled cell in the Recipe Name column, hold your mouse over its bottom right corner and, when the + cursor appears, drag it down one cell.
Double click in the new cell and change the number 5 to read 6 without changing anything else in the cell. Press Enter. You will see that Excel has created a Click to view link for you which, when you click it, will take you to the new sheet. Repeat these steps to make more empty sheets. Save your work when you are done.
Once you have added a few recipes you can browse them using the Recipe Contents sheet. Click it to view your recipes. To view all recipes in a category, click the arrow to the right of Category and select the boxes for only the category or categories to view. You can do a similar thing to view only 4 star recipes.
To clear the filter and return to viewing all of your recipes, make sure your cursor is placed somewhere in the recipe list. Then, from the Home tab of the Ribbon click Sort & Filter > Clear. This resets all the filters and redisplays all the details for all the recipes.
