Need to know where to begin in creating a nutritional spreadsheet

[newb@excel]

Hey guys!

As my handle suggests, I have very little excel knowledge. I have a job-related spreadsheet task I need to undertake, and I need some advice/assistance with where to start and how to format.

Here's what I need to do:

I need to create a way to summarize nutritional information of various dishes I create for a restaurant. I will be making large quantities of food which will be portioned out into servings, so I can either figure out how much of each ingredient is in a serving, or list the total amount of the ingredient and then the number of servings it created.

I am thinking of making an alphabetical list of ingredients (maybe 100+) and initially listing the amount of fat/carbs/protein in one ounce of each ingredient. Then I could enter in the value of each ingredient and have it come up with a total per serving.

Can anyone help me get started on this? I don't know where to begin or what to do.

Thanks so much!

Benjamin

[FDibbins]

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[newb@excel]

Well thanks for informing me about my thread title, but...

Can you offer any help for my issue?

[RHCPgergo]

Hi,

you could make a database of ingredients and their nutritional values. After that there are multiple ways to use that data to calculate nutritional values for dishes made out of various amounts of multiple ingredients. I've made an example for you of a possible way.
ingredients_example.xls

Edit: I've made the first column in the 'calculator' worksheet so you can choose values from a list, but apparently it wasn't saved in excel 2003 format. :\

[newb@excel]

Thanks! Much appreciated. It's a start!