The Excel VBA Recipe Grabber is a prototype of a product for
which I wrote a business plan a couple years ago for a marketing class. The
idea was to have a single easy-to-use online resource for planning all things
food. This online database would help users store, share, and find recipes, get
nutrition facts and food costs for these recipes, create meal plans and
shopping lists (and possibly even submit an online order for foods needed)
based on the individual’s unique nutritional needs and financial and time
constraints. The problem with current websites is that the ones that are easy
to use do not provide complete information or functions (like nutrition facts
or food costs), and the ones that provide nutrition facts or food costs are
cumbersome to use.
My VBA project did not attempt to be better than any existing
online recipe website. Rather, it served as an experiment for me to get a
better idea of the challenges involved in creating a user-friendly do-all food
planner. Hopefully by going through some of these challenges with this project,
if I ever end up starting a company to execute this business plan, I’ll have
some background to help me better anticipate and understand the challenges encountered
by the programmers I hire.
The original scope of my project was to allow users to:
·
Enter their own recipes and photos
·
Browse and view recipes previously entered
·
View basic nutrition facts for each recipe
·
Scale recipes to different sizes
·
Assign a recipe to a specific date and mealtime
on a calendar
·
Generate a shopping list based on recipe
ingredients for recipes on the calendar within a specified date range
However, after creating the form to allow users to enter and
save a recipe, I decided it would be useful to create a form to allow them to
find a recipe online, “grab” it, and save it in their own database. As I began
setting these forms up for calculating the nutrition facts it became clear that
the scope of my project was too big for someone with so little programming
experience in the available timeframe. The redefined scope of my project therefore
is as follows:
·
Allow users to enter recipes
·
Allow them to “Grab” recipes from recipe.com
·
Match recipe ingredients up to the list of
ingredients that corresponds with nutrition facts
·
Memorize user’s matches between the above
ingredients fields for future use
·
Save recipes to a text file that would be easy
to write back into Excel
In other words, the user is not yet able to browse recipes
previously entered (although he can open them in txt format), and there is no
display of nutrition facts, no scaling of recipes, and no shopping list
functionality. These will have to be explored another time. However, the added
functions of 1. “grabbing” recipes from a website, and 2. Building in
artificial intelligence (yes, you read that right), were huge additions that
required significant time and resourcefulness.
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