Instructions for the Party Food tracker.

There are two parts to the tracker: The bit that tells us how much food we need to eat, and the bit that tells us how much food we've eaten on a given day and how much we have left.

The bit that tells us how much we need to eat

The bit that tells us how much we have left

The two work together, but are not directly linked.  You will notice there is a "check total" on the left portion.  This adds up all the food that is calculated that we have eaten on the right so we can compare it to the "Food Consumed" box on the left so that we are sure we've eaten and drunk enough.

The cell with the date has a bit of instruction in it, simply hover over it and you can read the instructions.  The short version (not that the note is terribly long...) is don't change the date until we have finished eating for the day and copied the Remaining quantities into the Original Quantity column.

I've split the food portion up into three categories (mainly because of the food rules I use in my home game): Protein, Carbohydrates, and Greens.  Drinks are off to the right, and the table works on the same principle as the other tables, but it only counts as half a pound per unit per Alexis's rules about beer and food.

How it actually works

Each category table is summed up in the cell labeled "Total", this is the amount of food available for the date given in the Date cell.  Below that is the cell where the amount of that category we wish to eat is located.  In the calculation portion it will tell us how much we need to eat (in total), and depending on the categories indicated (Y/N in the Meat? Bread? Greens? cells), how much we should assign per category (the "Per Portion" cell).  This is only a guideline. The amount eaten of each category must be input manually into the Lbs Eaten cell for each category.  Below the Lbs eaten is the Total Remaining cell, which will be used to calculate the amount of each type of food eaten based on the Split column.

The Split column is a tool to allow us to prefer one food item over another.  For example, if we have three times as much Cod as we do Herring, we can put 3 int the Cod split and 1 in the Herring split, and the remainder will be calculated for us.  These numbers can be played around with to get the ratios right.

The total under the Remaining column is another check to make sure it matches the Total Remaining cell under the Original Qty column. The Check Total cell in the calculation section is the amount of food we've actually eaten, in case it doesn't need to match up with the Food Consumed calculation based on people eating and pounds per person.

Once we have massaged the numbers int acceptable ranges, we can copy and paste the Remaining column "Values Only" into the Original column and change the date to the next day, and start it all over again!  Yay!

Make sense?