Introduction
As I started my adventures in bread baking, I had to learn about baker's percentages, formula scaling, total flour weight and many other things.
Since much of this has far better explanations provided elsewhere, I will not repeat it here. I did find, however, that with so much to calculate, the potential for error was significant, and some calculations are very repetetive. So I decided to put together a spreadsheet to aid with all that.
I am distributing this spreadsheet for your personal use. You may download it here after agreeing to the terms.
Dough Calculator Documentation
The spreadsheet is far from a finished product and as an Excel based product is limited in its ability to provide an excellent user experience. Nevertheless, I've done quite a bit to make it as easy to use as possible within the confines of Excel.
There are many possible uses of the calculator and I am documenting each of them in the following pages.
Note to Macintosh users
Originally this spreadsheet was developed on a Macintosh. As I tried to make it more functional I introduced the use of VBA macros. These were occasionally crashing Excel. Trying the exact same thing on the PC did not cause a crash. So I started doing my development under Windows XP (Parallels on a Macintosh!). After substantial development I tried to run it on the Macintosh again, but at this point I found out that VBA for Excel on Macintosh and Windows are only compatible at some basic level, and of course I had now used some incompatible features.
I decided to no longer support the Macintosh. Not only for the above reason, but also because Microsoft announced that the upcoming 2008 version of Office will not support VBA at all anymore. I do not want to maintain two versions.
If you are a Macintosh user, your only hope is to run windows under Parallels Desktop, or under VMWare's Fusion product.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: Now that I have Office 365 it appears the VBA is back and seems to work correctly, so give that a try if you are a Macintosh user!