I am a currently a culinary assistant for a major wholesale food company that specializes in soup. I work under the head chef in the R&D department and I want to make their recipes and their ingredient logs more efficient. It’s my first job out of school, I’m in my second month, and I’m trying to prove I’m indispensable.

Anyways, there are several hundred recipes for many different companies and restaurants - each in their own excel file. There are even more ingredients but they are compiled into one excel file. As efficiently as possible I want to compile all the recipes into one document or workbook. I want to be able to search for an ingredient and see every recipe that it is in, and from there be able to click a recipe and have it open in a separate window. It would be so great to know what ingredients we barely use, as it costs beaucoup bucks to order them in the quantities that we do. What would be the best way to go about doing this with excel and/or Microsoft office suite 2013? Any help to set me off in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

-bat