Excel experts.. lend me your brain!!!!

digitalbill

I have a six page spreadsheet. Five of the pages are listed Breakfast, Mid morning, lunch, Mid Afternoon, and dinner.
The sixth page is what I was hoping to run my formulas in.

On page six, I have five colums listed in order of the five "meal" spreadsheets and I was able to create dropdowns that reflect meals that I have put in all five of the tables.
However, I am trying to create an "if" command to display the menu, prep, and calories per meal.
All of these are already inserted into the appropriate spreadsheets but, I cannot seem to figure out how to display.
For example, if you select from the breakfast dropdown, "Omelet", it will display that food in column B2 which pulls from "Breakfast B1" however, I would also like it to automatically display "Breakfast C1:J1" on page six.
I thought it would be something simple like:
"=IF B2 = BreakfastB1 THEN display Breakfast C1"
However, that is not working.
Can anyone offer up some advise?

wembleyruns

I would probably use a vlookup formula.

ElizabethRoad

I'm good at Excel but I'm bad at figuring out what people are trying to do. But do you need the correct syntax for your formula, or do you need a different formula? "=IF B2 = BreakfastB1 THEN display Breakfast C1" in Excel would be:

=IF(B2=Breakfast!B1,Breakfast!C1)

VLOOKUP might be more appropriate... but I can't picture what you want to do.

tageekly

I also think VLOOKUP is the way to go...

GasMasterFlash

Screenshots of what you're aiming for would help.

cabaray

Definitly VLOOKUP

digitalbill

I think we are close.
OK. I have a spreadsheet called "breakfast"
A B C
Meal Name Ingredients
1 Proatmeal "2/3 cup cooked oatmeal, prepared with water
1 scoop protein powder
1/2 cup fresh or frozen berries
1-1/2 Tbsp. chopped walnuts
1/4 cup skim, almond, or soy milk."

I have 10 meals on this spreadsheet.
I have five of these spreadsheets for all five mealtimes.
On the 6th spreadsheet, In column A, row 1-5, I have all five spreadsheets listed.
Breakfast
Mid Morning
Lunch
Mid Afternoon
Dinner
On the 6th spreadsheet in column B, I have dropdowns which will pull from the appropriate name in column B from whatever spreadsheet I choose.
That all works fine and dandy.
What I am trying to do however is, IF I select, lets say, Proatmeal, from the dropdown, then I also want it to display the ingrediets in another column. (Maybe D)
I am looking at the VLOOKUP and I am just a little confused.

digitalbill

OK. This is the screenshot showing my "breakfast" spreadsheet.

As you can see on the tabs on the bottom, I have all five mealtimes listed plus a sixth called "sheet1" (lazy so far.)

On sheet1, I have this.


and the dropdown looks like this:

What I was hoping to do was, when I select something from the dropdown (which = "Breakfast B1" in this example), Not only do I want the mealname to display in column B2 on "sheet1" but, I would also like for "Breakfast C1" to display in, maybe "sheet1 C2"

tageekly

It would be easier if you had the meals/ingredients on one sheet, then you have to write only one VLOOKUP with how I'm thinking about it, but the way I would write the formula in what you currently have is in cell C2 you'd do

=VLOOKUP(B1,'Breakfast'!$B:$C,2,0)

And then you rewrite this for each worksheet name to match the name, e.g. Lunch, Dinner, etc.


Edited to remove that part about the data format since you posted a pic as I was answering...