As I started my adventures in bread baking, I had to learn about baker’s percentages, formula scaling, total flour weight, and more.

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 repetitive. 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, it 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:

• Calculator Worksheets:
  • Overview
  • Recipe sheet
  • Analysis sheet
  • Reverse sheet
  • Levains sheet
  • Lookup sheet
• Other Dough Topics:
  • Desired Dough Temperature
  • Control your dough Temperature
  • Friction Factor
  • US & Metric Equivalencies
• Download the dough calculator spreadsheet

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 developing 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 stop supporting 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 using Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion.

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!