Wow, Batarcit. That's a tall order.

With several hundred recipes and an unequal number of ingredients, it's hard to work with Excel and use it as a database. I think it's time you look into getting your company to use Access as a database. I've dabbled in it and recommend a course or an instruction book (whatever suits your learning style) to help you learn it.

Of course, then the situation is that you know Access and probably no one else at the company does. That means either job security or inconvenience.

Just thinking - The way you have it now, you can open the folder with all the recipes in MS File Explorer (you know, the little yellow file folder), search for "broccoli" and it will show all those recipes - which you would have to open one by one.

Another option: Put all the recipes on one worksheet. Add page breaks between each recipe. But then it turns into a logic problem: How do you tell Excel to search for broccoli everywhere, not just in one column? However, I'm thinking there must be companies that have a similar variety of data in Excel and they want to bring up certain data and hide others.

Could you attach a sample recipe in Excel or at least a screenshot to get an idea of what you're dealing with? A nice vegetarian soup with or without broccoli would be nice.