I make mostly salt soaps so I only use individual cavity silicone molds and have quite a few in different shapes. I often want to make X of that mold and Y of this mold, but the math was long.
I started by making an Excel sheet on a handheld PC from the late 90s (basically a pocket sized laptop that runs on AA batteries, the grayscale models can last up to a month of daily use on a single charge, try that with any modern computer) that I can take to my soap making area to view and I would enter the amount of each mold and it would tell me how much oil, salt, essential oil and coloring I'd need for that batch, then I would enter the oils on a soap calc website on the internet on my smartphone to calculate the lye.
I was sick of doing half the calculations on the handheld PC and half on my smart phone, so I improved my Excel sheet so I can tell it the percentage of each oil I want and it will calculate how much water and lye I need, so I can finally do all the maths on the handheld PC.
Here's a screen shot of my Excel sheet on the grayscale handheld PC:
By the way that recipe in the screen shot is the biggest batch I ever made (4.68 kg/10.3 lbs), my large soap making pot was 2/3 full.
This is the handheld PC itself, it has an 80 MHz processor, 8 MB RAM, Windows CE 2.0 and a backlit grayscale LCD and is from 1998 but obviously still very useful especially with about 30 days of daily use on a single charge:
I started by making an Excel sheet on a handheld PC from the late 90s (basically a pocket sized laptop that runs on AA batteries, the grayscale models can last up to a month of daily use on a single charge, try that with any modern computer) that I can take to my soap making area to view and I would enter the amount of each mold and it would tell me how much oil, salt, essential oil and coloring I'd need for that batch, then I would enter the oils on a soap calc website on the internet on my smartphone to calculate the lye.
I was sick of doing half the calculations on the handheld PC and half on my smart phone, so I improved my Excel sheet so I can tell it the percentage of each oil I want and it will calculate how much water and lye I need, so I can finally do all the maths on the handheld PC.
Here's a screen shot of my Excel sheet on the grayscale handheld PC:
By the way that recipe in the screen shot is the biggest batch I ever made (4.68 kg/10.3 lbs), my large soap making pot was 2/3 full.
This is the handheld PC itself, it has an 80 MHz processor, 8 MB RAM, Windows CE 2.0 and a backlit grayscale LCD and is from 1998 but obviously still very useful especially with about 30 days of daily use on a single charge:
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