I just remembered I do have a quick and dirty inventory system. It really just keeps a list of items and their location which it can combine into a single sheet and place the items in alphabetical order.
It was created because I do a lot of travelling and have an enormous amount of equipment in many different places but require different stuff for very different trips/occasions. Sometimes finding the right piece of a equipment for a particular trip was an awful chore not helped by the fact that I am a bit of a hoarder.
Basically a spreadsheet lists all the items in one location together with its more precise location within that general area. It doesn’t matter how many locations/spreadsheets as it can cope with any number.
As a simple example here is a list of stuff I keep in the car the list can be in any order for convenience.
The result is a complete list of items in alphabetical order (notice it is sorted on column three). The columns can be rearranged but this is the best arrangement for me. It could be used for any large list of items spread over a number of locations.
Not very sophisticated but has saved me a lot of searching for elusive things at times because they are often things you might only need once or twice a year.
I have a freezer spreadsheet but, for the last few years, I’ve been using increasingly sophisticated shopping list apps (for PC and phone) and the spreadsheet now seems clumsy and inadequate.
The disruption to the food supply chain caused by the COVID pandemic has meant that I now shop just-in-case as well as just-in-time - so I need to plan for my food reserves to fit my storage spaces …
I think I’d have the opposite problem, if the internet went down I’d eat too much especially with all this wet weather we have been having. Fortunately my fibre connection has proved very resilient and I can only recall one failure in the last several years.
On the other hand Covid restrictions have meant everybody has spent too much time stuck close to their fridge.
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Well that would certainly make my fridge thermostat go right down. A fridge that says don’t open me you’ve had enough to eat or your are eating the wrong foods. Perhaps something to think about for those who have too little willpower and need a bit of automated control?
It’s taking a while to enter my fridge/freezer/pantry contents but, already, I’ve been prompted to use up 2 items which I’d forgotten about and which may have passed their BB4 date, had not the app reminded me.
An additional task that I have undertaken is to manually label each item with the app date, since multiple similar items are only differentiated by their package dates, which are sometimes illegible. Since the items and categories on the app are colour coded, I may well go down that route for manual labels, too.
Recently I found a nearby cafe that sells complete meals for $5 each. If you buy ten meals they will deliver them anywhere in the Wollongong LGA for free. The menu has about 15 or so items on it but trying to select ten from that list without adding some personal bias proved to be quite difficult so I automated it
As part of my never ending quest for better inventory control I wrote some code which selected 10 items from a list and immediately printed them out as a list together with the date of selection. This was achieved by pressing one button next to the list of available items as below.
The selection is entirely random and includes no duplicates, the list itself can be of any length greater than ten (obviously) edited and/or expanded at any time. Apart from the printout no record is kept of the selection, obviously the printout is itself a dated record of the inventory.
Once the delivery has been made the whole lot goes into the freezer.
Option Explicit
Sub SelectMeals()
Dim Lnth As Long
Dim Numb As Long
Dim Nxt As Long
Dim Slct As Long
Dim Meal As String
'Counter for meals selected
Nxt = 2
'Number of meals to Select (could be a cell value)
Slct = 10
'Length of meals listed
Lnth = Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(Rows.Count, "A").End(xlUp).Row
Do
Randomize
'Generate random number
Numb = Int(1 + Rnd * (Lnth - 1 + 1))
'Collect name of meal
Meal = Sheets("Sheet1").Range("A" & Numb).Value
'Check to see if meal already selected
If IsError(Application.Match(Meal, Sheets("Sheet2").Range("A:A"), 0)) Then
'if not previously selected add meal to list
'and increment number of meals selected
Sheets("Sheet2").Range("A" & Nxt).Value = Meal
Nxt = Nxt + 1
End If
Loop Until Nxt = Slct + 2
Sheets("Sheet2").Range("A1").Value = "Selected on " & Format(Date, "DDDD, D MMM")
'Autofit column
Sheets("Sheet2").Range("A1").EntireColumn.AutoFit
'Print out list
Sheets("Sheet2").Range("A1:A" & Lnth).PrintOut
'Clear the list ready for next time
Sheets("Sheet2").Range("A1:A" & Lnth).Clear
End Sub
Just copy and paste the above code into a module and point the button to that code.
The code could be used to select any number of items from any list it doesn’t have to be food.
To change the number selected alter the line:
Slct = 10
I preset the print area so it would be possible to include that number of selections in a different column (for example cell H1) in which case that line would be:
Slct = Sheets(“Sheet1”).Range(“H1”).Value
(I just made that up on the fly but it should work)
