Excell with Excel

Numbers numbers numbers! Ever feel like you're drowning in them? On 4-05-06 the average plate cost was $6.87 and tomorrow at 5:45 you have to be in room 455 for 55 minutes, and you have to remember to pay that electric bill by 3-23-2010 for $213... It's never ending! But no worries, there is a software program that will quickly solve all you numerical needs. Spreadsheet software's like excel, allow their users to organize data on a clearly readable worksheet, and set their mind at ease.

For our restaurant, Excel is a great tool. Instead of keeping all of your recites and paper copies of your companies history is a messy cabinet file system, you can easily create a worksheet that will keep track of all of this data and compile it into understandable means. For instance, you have the ability to make a graph to represent how much your labor costs have increased over the past five years with a bar graph, or use a pie chart to see where you spend your most money. By entering labels, values or formulas into a cell (the intersection of a column and a row), you can keep all sorts of information organized. You can also format each cell with a different color, font, underlining etc... Doing so makes the worksheet very comprehensible.

Excel has the capability to compute hundreds of formulas, in seconds. For instance, you could use a sum formula to add up all of the costs in this months inventory. Or you could use excel to figure out how much gratuity should be added to a bill for a banquet. But you are not only limited to formulas. Excel has predefined formulas that preform common calculations such as adding the value of multiple cells known as a function. For example, the function =SUM(B8:B23) instructs the spreadsheet to add up all of the numbers in cells B8 through B23, instead of clicking on each one. Functions are a huge time saver, and in this industry, we know, time is money.

Besides excel, you can also purchase other software programs to use in the kitchen. For instance the Cook's Palate will automatically scale recipes for you, generate shopping lists from recipes, plan and schedule meals, and import popular recipe formats from web sites, other recipe programs or even scanned recipes.

Technology is making the kitchen life simpler by the minute, and saving you time and money!