Hello everyone. Before I get started on my next phase, I was wondering if some of you could give me some tips on the best way to link spreadsheets together for my nutrition app. I’m not sure if I should use filters or relations. Check out the image of a simple diagram because one of the options, I could add the list of foods on the same sheet which might make it easier. Would love some input please… thank you!
In the link between sheet B & C, let’s say Vitamin B1 Foods have Beans, Peas, Lettuce for example. Does it have to be a complete match to return the “Healthy Bean Salad”, as in if the salad has eggs for example, will it be returned?
It is ok if the salad has other ingredients because that will become a choice for the user to make. However, there will be a feature for the user to choose Vegan which will filter out any recipes that have animal products so then, they would not see a salad containing egg.
In sheet B, do you plan to store all types of food for a vitamin in only one cell, or will there be different rows?
As of right now, it is all in one cell with the foods separated by a “,”
Example: Avocado, sweet potato, spinach, edamame
Would it be better if each food was in it’s own row / cell?
How many types of vitamin do you plan to have for sheet A?
23 total
What do you think if in the Recipes sheet, we pre-populate some columns that this recipe correlates with which vitamins?
There are over 4 thousand recipes and I don’t have that kind of time.
The assessment shows the top foods that contain those vitamins. So all I need to do is have the app find those foods and display the recipes. It will be up to the user which ones they want to eat. There will be another filter here as well that will find recipes based on the users skill level in the kitchen. Example: easy recipe or quick recipe
This is the tricky part, we have to have a design that links the foods that contain the vitamin to the recipe. The recipe may contain just some of the food types, not all of them.
A while ago there was a talk about having some kind of a “What do we eat today?” with the requirements that the user list what types of food they have in the fridge, then recipes would come up to suggest what they should cook. The same problem applies here, it’s a partial match not a full match.
To have a partial match working I think you must have those food types in sheet B in separate cells, either by multiple rows or multiple columns.
FYI: It is ok for it not to be an exact match because recipes have many ingredients. It is up to the user to decide if they want that recipe. So, it does not matter if the recipe only contains some of the foods.
So, you can’t search one cell that has a list of a bunch of foods?
If that is not possible then I can do columns with the name of the vitamin/nutrient in the header and then list all the foods below. Would that work?
I mean matching partially is harder than matching the full package.
You might find some idea from this.