Based on the number of people who didn't think I was crazy and wanted their very own copy of the Access file lauded in the previous post, I have made the file available for download here, along with a video tutorial of how to use it.
Okay, so there are 2 versions.
First, the Simple Grocery List Maker.
This is an Excel file that will create grocery lists for you. You enter in meals/ingredients, select which you want to make, and the file creates a grocery list ready to print and take to the store.
Download the file here: https://sites.google.com/site/erinsandbox/documents/GroceryListMaker.xls?attredirects=0&d=1
Watch the video tutorial (recommended):
(Link to YouTube video)
Second, the Ultimate Meal Planner.
This is an Access database that will create printable recipe cards and a grocery list. If you're really serious about this, choose this option because once you're already entering in meals and ingredients, you may as well get a formatted recipe card out of it. In this database, you fill out recipe forms to create your cards (ready to print on 4x6 cards). Use the grocery form to select meals and generate a list ready to print and take to the store.
Download the file here
https://sites.google.com/site/erinsandbox/documents/Recipes.accdb?attredirects=0&d=1
Watch the video tutorials (strongly, highly, very recommended):
(Link to YouTube video)
(Link to YouTube video)
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
what do you get when you cross a stay-at-home mom with a spreadsheet freak?
Me!
With the end result of an Access database that generates 4x6 recipe cards and my weekly grocery lists with just a few clicks.
The inefficiencies of my meal planning system have been gnawing at me for a while now. Searching for recipes stuffed into recipe boxes, saved on my delicious.com account, scribbled on a napkin at the bottom of my purse. Or, spending 20 minutes writing my grocery list and getting home to discover I've forgotten the noodles for spaghetti. Or, eating the same foods week after week because it's too hard to look in various places mentioned above for recipes I haven't made in a while.
Over the last 2 weeks I have streamlined a solution. In my Access database, I can fill out a form to enter in a new recipe. The recipe automatically uploads into a report that prints onto a 4x6 card so I can add it to my "recipe ring". The recipe ring frees cards from the constraints of a box. Instead cards are clipped together with 2 rings that allows for faster flip-through. Plus the card won't ever leave the box and mysteriously disappear - the whole bunch stays together on the ring.
That's pretty handy. But the best part is that all of those recipes feed into a grocery list creator. Okay, it's really just a pivot table. The coolest pivot table ever.* It gives me a drop-down list of my recipes. I select which meals I want to make that week and it gives me a list of ingredients I need to buy. And quantities - summed across recipes. And it sorts it by store section (produce, bakery, meat, etc). One Ctrl+P later and I've got a complete, sorted grocery list to take with me to the store.
The only flaw in the system (which I've encountered twice now) is when I leave the grocery list sitting on the kitchen table. Operator error.
I know this all sounds a little crazy. But meal planning has always been a thing with me. Have I ever written about the time I was gearing up for a very busy school semester, so I planned out 16 weeks of dinners? I printed out 16 pages of grocery lists, one for each week, that had the week's dinners and necessary ingredients. I set the stack on my nightstand and didn't think about what to make for dinner for the next 4 months. Talk about efficient.
At this point, you may be feeling one of two ways. 1) Wow! Maybe Erin will send me a copy of her Access database so I can use it too (I'd be happy to). 2) Wow! This is the scariest Halloween post I've ever read.
*Credit for the pivot table goes to my friend Melissa, who first came up with this concept using the pivot tables in Excel.
With the end result of an Access database that generates 4x6 recipe cards and my weekly grocery lists with just a few clicks.
The inefficiencies of my meal planning system have been gnawing at me for a while now. Searching for recipes stuffed into recipe boxes, saved on my delicious.com account, scribbled on a napkin at the bottom of my purse. Or, spending 20 minutes writing my grocery list and getting home to discover I've forgotten the noodles for spaghetti. Or, eating the same foods week after week because it's too hard to look in various places mentioned above for recipes I haven't made in a while.
Over the last 2 weeks I have streamlined a solution. In my Access database, I can fill out a form to enter in a new recipe. The recipe automatically uploads into a report that prints onto a 4x6 card so I can add it to my "recipe ring". The recipe ring frees cards from the constraints of a box. Instead cards are clipped together with 2 rings that allows for faster flip-through. Plus the card won't ever leave the box and mysteriously disappear - the whole bunch stays together on the ring.
That's pretty handy. But the best part is that all of those recipes feed into a grocery list creator. Okay, it's really just a pivot table. The coolest pivot table ever.* It gives me a drop-down list of my recipes. I select which meals I want to make that week and it gives me a list of ingredients I need to buy. And quantities - summed across recipes. And it sorts it by store section (produce, bakery, meat, etc). One Ctrl+P later and I've got a complete, sorted grocery list to take with me to the store.
The only flaw in the system (which I've encountered twice now) is when I leave the grocery list sitting on the kitchen table. Operator error.
I know this all sounds a little crazy. But meal planning has always been a thing with me. Have I ever written about the time I was gearing up for a very busy school semester, so I planned out 16 weeks of dinners? I printed out 16 pages of grocery lists, one for each week, that had the week's dinners and necessary ingredients. I set the stack on my nightstand and didn't think about what to make for dinner for the next 4 months. Talk about efficient.
At this point, you may be feeling one of two ways. 1) Wow! Maybe Erin will send me a copy of her Access database so I can use it too (I'd be happy to). 2) Wow! This is the scariest Halloween post I've ever read.
*Credit for the pivot table goes to my friend Melissa, who first came up with this concept using the pivot tables in Excel.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
good morning. this is hal.
Some people get nervous about how companies track personal information of customers and use it to tailor marketing campaigns to them.
I think it's wonderful.
First of all, it's cool to think that hundreds of servers around the world are humming and blinking away, just to discern my behavioral patterns. I assume that everything I do that has a computer attached to it is being tracked by someone. And as long as they don't share passwords to my email and financial accounts, I'm pretty much okay with that.
Second, I get some great benefits from this. Kroger sends me coupons every month that are only for things I purchase often. This week I received $15 worth of discounts on baby carrots, chicken tenderloins, fancy shredded cheese, oats, All detergent, mini-wheats, canned tomatoes, better crocker cake, welch's grape juice, Sauve, meat department purchases, pasta, and parmesan cheese. Last year I looked into coupon clipping as a way to save money and quickly found that combing through pages of coupons resulted in one or two products that I would actually use. Not worth it.
(Kroger, if you are listening to this, thank you for creating a card I can swipe each time I check out so you can give me money.)
Another example is Google History (check yours out here, if you have a Google account). When you are logged in to Google and open other tabs in your browser, Google will track all of your web searches and which hits you visited - completely free of charge! Look at the nifty facts I found about my web searching behavior:
- Mondays and Tuesdays are highest for search activity
- My hourly search activity is a left-skewed bell curve with a high point around 3pm
- My top query is "magic bus" (This has me a little perplexed. The search is for a tracking system for the university buses, which I definitely used, but not to excess - or so I thought.)
- On March 6, 2006, I searched for "red apple attack"
- On February 24, 2006, I searched for "movies 8 provo", so apparently we were going on a date to the dollar theater that weekend
This history tracker has actually been somewhat helpful in finding long-lost websites. Often I know exactly when I was searching for something (or, the approximate month). With this, I can go back to that month and find it.
It's like having a journal that I don't even have to write in.
I think it's wonderful.
First of all, it's cool to think that hundreds of servers around the world are humming and blinking away, just to discern my behavioral patterns. I assume that everything I do that has a computer attached to it is being tracked by someone. And as long as they don't share passwords to my email and financial accounts, I'm pretty much okay with that.
Second, I get some great benefits from this. Kroger sends me coupons every month that are only for things I purchase often. This week I received $15 worth of discounts on baby carrots, chicken tenderloins, fancy shredded cheese, oats, All detergent, mini-wheats, canned tomatoes, better crocker cake, welch's grape juice, Sauve, meat department purchases, pasta, and parmesan cheese. Last year I looked into coupon clipping as a way to save money and quickly found that combing through pages of coupons resulted in one or two products that I would actually use. Not worth it.
(Kroger, if you are listening to this, thank you for creating a card I can swipe each time I check out so you can give me money.)
Another example is Google History (check yours out here, if you have a Google account). When you are logged in to Google and open other tabs in your browser, Google will track all of your web searches and which hits you visited - completely free of charge! Look at the nifty facts I found about my web searching behavior:
- Mondays and Tuesdays are highest for search activity
- My hourly search activity is a left-skewed bell curve with a high point around 3pm
- My top query is "magic bus" (This has me a little perplexed. The search is for a tracking system for the university buses, which I definitely used, but not to excess - or so I thought.)
- On March 6, 2006, I searched for "red apple attack"
- On February 24, 2006, I searched for "movies 8 provo", so apparently we were going on a date to the dollar theater that weekend
This history tracker has actually been somewhat helpful in finding long-lost websites. Often I know exactly when I was searching for something (or, the approximate month). With this, I can go back to that month and find it.
It's like having a journal that I don't even have to write in.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Potbellys = 141.8% of my daily protein!
My coworker introduced me to a slick web application for tracking daily food intake. MyPlate is part of the Lance Armstrong LiveStrong website. The application works off of user-generated content. Anyone can enter in the nutritional value for any food. This creates a huge database of foods that you can then search for the specific food you've eaten that day. It gets quite specific: 2% milk from Kroger, Kashi Pumpkin Spice Granola Bar, raw blueberries.
[Screenshot of website]
After putting in your food, it will calculate your nutrition intake, by day, week, month. I was pretty cheery when entering in my oatmeal and strawberry breakfast, but not so much with the PotBelly Big Turkey Sandwich for lunch, where my protein shot up to 141.8% daily value and sodium to 120.6%.
There are a few other nifty features, like being able to save a meal (e.g. cereal, milk & blueberries together as "breakfast" rather than entering each item in separately) or writing how your body feels each day.
I've always wondered how many calories I really consume each day. That, along with a growing suspicion that my body is not digesting dairy as well as it used to, will (hopefully) motivate me to use this for a few weeks.
Results forthcoming.
[Screenshot of website]
After putting in your food, it will calculate your nutrition intake, by day, week, month. I was pretty cheery when entering in my oatmeal and strawberry breakfast, but not so much with the PotBelly Big Turkey Sandwich for lunch, where my protein shot up to 141.8% daily value and sodium to 120.6%.
There are a few other nifty features, like being able to save a meal (e.g. cereal, milk & blueberries together as "breakfast" rather than entering each item in separately) or writing how your body feels each day.
I've always wondered how many calories I really consume each day. That, along with a growing suspicion that my body is not digesting dairy as well as it used to, will (hopefully) motivate me to use this for a few weeks.
Results forthcoming.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
pull the plug!
A few months, my computer got its life sentence. It took the form of a small pop-up bubble that comes on every time the computer starts up, saying "Java Update Available". Nothing against Java. But the pop-up bubble - the one at the bottom right of the computer screen - you know the one I'm talking about...
That bubble is a sign of impending digital death, or at least significant slow-down. Our circa 2003 laptop (Jurassic Period) has about 5 of these pop-up bubbles now. When I turn on my laptop, I can watch them come on one-by-one while eating a delicious breakfast omelet, because it takes about the same time to start up the laptop as it does to make a delicious omelet.
The point being, as soon as I fire up a new computer, it begins a slow death via an endless queue of updates, packages, etc. that sometimes manifest themselves as cute pop-up bubbles. I'm pretty sure most of these updates are excuses to make my computer run slower and slower until I give up and buy a new one with more processing power.
There's even a word for it.
"Planned obsolescence is the process of a product becoming obsolete and/or non-functional after a certain period or amount of use in a way that is planned or designed by the manufacturer." - wikipedia
How sinister!
Thank goodness for the "Remind me Later" button. The perfect passive aggressive tool against the sleazy manufacturers of planned obsolescence.
That bubble is a sign of impending digital death, or at least significant slow-down. Our circa 2003 laptop (Jurassic Period) has about 5 of these pop-up bubbles now. When I turn on my laptop, I can watch them come on one-by-one while eating a delicious breakfast omelet, because it takes about the same time to start up the laptop as it does to make a delicious omelet.
The point being, as soon as I fire up a new computer, it begins a slow death via an endless queue of updates, packages, etc. that sometimes manifest themselves as cute pop-up bubbles. I'm pretty sure most of these updates are excuses to make my computer run slower and slower until I give up and buy a new one with more processing power.
There's even a word for it.
"Planned obsolescence is the process of a product becoming obsolete and/or non-functional after a certain period or amount of use in a way that is planned or designed by the manufacturer." - wikipedia
How sinister!
Thank goodness for the "Remind me Later" button. The perfect passive aggressive tool against the sleazy manufacturers of planned obsolescence.
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