Whisk Recipe Organizer - Brandon Anderson - Winter 2010

Problem

My wife spends a lot of time trying to determine (usually at the last minute) if we have all the ingredients for a proposed meal.  Sometimes she gets halfway through meal preparation only to discover that she’s missing one critical item, which she must then go out and buy or borrow from a neighbor.  As a consequence, she often just looks at what we have in the pantry and refrigerator and whips up some simple meal that uses only those ingredients she knows she has.  She’d like to plan ahead, but it’s very difficult to find the time to put a meal calendar together, to calculate all the needed ingredients, and to make sure she buys all the necessary items and quantities in advance.

Solution

I have created a meal planning tool that allows my wife to generate meal plans and shopping lists quickly and easily.  My wife can input her recipes into the tool, view and edit them, and create/print a meal calendar by selecting a recipe for each day.  Furthermore, the program generates a shopping list, showing the items that need to be purchased in order to make the desired meal plan work.  The Whisk Recipe Organizer is basically a database.  Information about recipes is stored on hidden worksheets; the user interacts only with user forms, and occasionally with the print preview screen in order to print either a meal calendar or a shopping list.

Overview

When the sheet opens or the user clicks the start button, the main menu is presented.  The user can select to add a recipe, to view/edit a recipe, to create a meal calendar, or to exit Whisk. Each function has its own easy-to-use user form with buttons to save, delete, clear, print, or return to the main menu (depending on the needed functions of that particular form).  This makes it very easy for someone with no Excel experience to enjoy the organizational benefits of such a program.


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