Bread Cost Calculator | The Fresh Loaf

I've received many email requests for the Excel Costing Calculator I assembled recently and all requests have been fulfilled (as of this posting).

Because of the interest I also posted it on my web site. Admittedly, it is somewhat crude, but it works, and I will do my best to improve it as I become more familiar with Excel's idiosyncrasies.

If you're interested you can check it out at:

http://www.flournwater.com/

- click on Technical Stuff, then onTopic 5.

There seems to be no HTML output from your site.

In other words, I get a blank screen.

You're right. From the link I posted above the connection produces a blank screen. That's odd, because I find it works quite well from every other source.

Give me a while and let me see if I can find out what's wrong with the connection from this forum.

Post Script:

The link above works now. Perhaps it didn't like being imbedded in the text string. Give it another click ... Sorry for the problem.

~~The spreadsheet I downloaded off your website didn't work for me at all. It calculated the cost of a loaf to be more than the total of all the ingredients in their bulk quantities.~~ I figured out what was wrong, basically just a null value miscalculation. I was inspired though, so I created a google docs version that makes the same calculations and improved on it a little. Loaf Cost Calculator Features:

International Friendly, no monetary Units.
Calculate cost based on Loaf Weight or Quantity of Loafs created
Ignores unused and empty values
Helpful comments on relevant cells.

Future version may support a mix of grams, ounces, pounds and percentages etc. I've protected the main Sheet so malicious persons couldn't break it, anybody should feel free to Copy it to your own google spreadsheet or duplicate it in my shared sheet(use the popup menu on the sheet name at the bottom left), you can also use the File > Download As to save an excel version of your own. I also left in a demonstration calculation.

Sorry you experienced problems with it. Just a minute ago, i used it to calculate a formula using 4.5 ounces of flour, .09 ounces of salt, .25 ounces of water and .06 ounces of yeast at $3.20 per ounce from a supply of five pounds of flour costing $5, one pound of salt costing $1, Water at $1 per unit, yeast at $3.20 per ounce for a total cost of 64 cents for the loaf.

No problem, I figured it out. I noticed you said you were new to spreadsheets so I made a copy of your sheet and added it to my google document with some small adjustments too. You don't want to use the SUM() function when you aren't actually summing, you can do basic math calculations w/o a function: =B4/C5 instead of =SUM(B4/C5) Depending on which version and which software you are using different functions will do different things to try and figure out what you mean when it doesn't recognize the data you provide as correct. When you are calculating something that might not exist or could be zero the IF() function is very handy: IF(C1; C2 / C1; 0) This says: if cell C1 is not empty or zero, divide cell C1 and C2 else show zero. Very handy for avoiding divide by zero errors.

Thank you for that insight. I can make Excel work but I don't have enough experience with it (I'm self taught) to understand all the functions and your input is indeed a great help. I'll go back and play with it to see how good a student I am when using your information.

Syntax with my versin of Excel was somewhat different than what you're apparently using but with a few adjustments "=IF(C5, B5 / C5, 0)" it works just fine. Thanks for the heads-up.

Oops! I was typing too fast and not paying attention! Glad you figured it out. :) I went a little crazy and started on a version 2(same link as above on a seperate sheet) that can handle grams or ounces or a mixture of the two. Not really sure it's that useful but fun to toy around with nonetheless.