Creating Recipes - Linked inventories AND quantity?

[Jess]

There must be a better way do to this?
I have two tables - one with my inventory list of ingredients with information like: date of purchase, cost, description, quantity, etc – and another table with my perfume formulation (aka recipe). I really like being able to link my recipe ingredients to my inventory so I can easily go back and refer to my notes about that particular item. I also need to be able to log the quantity of the ingredient used. To achieve this I just have everything separated into multiple rows - but this makes things messy when you do any sort of reporting or alternate views or cross-referencing. This also makes the log longer, because instead of one recipe per row, there are multiple rows depending on how many ingredients I use.

There must be a better way to log the recipes I am working on? I also log as I am working on it, so the easier to edit the better.

[Scorance]

edit: I think I just realized the quantities is the problem. Sorry. :face_without_mouth:

I’d love to know this too. I need some kind of “matrix” as well.

[Jess]

Yes. I probably didn’t explain it very well :slightly_smiling_face: The quantities and not having everything in one row is the problem.

Base, Heart, Top, are parts what makes up a perfume. So a perfume will have certain notes that make up the Top (what you smell first, but also fades quickly, the Heart (you smell more after the top fades, and it helps to bring everything together) and the base (the longest lasting, often times more subtle notes). So each “recipe” will have different ingredients that each make up the top, heart, and base – which together form the perfume. Alchemy #1 has 5 units of Benzoin in the Base, for example.

And if I click on Benzoin, it is linked to my Inventory sheet, which tells me information about the supplier, how much I received, what that particular note smells like, what it blends well with, and all sorts of other details. If I didn’t need to have them linked then I could just have everything in a plain text field… but that would limit the functionality. I could also have a separate text field, and a field with just the items linked (with no amounts) but that would mean double entry and would slow down my process.