I created my own grocery list "app" with Google Sheets

I've gone through multiple grocery list apps, and have basically always used one. But they seem to always have some problem that causes me to ditch them.

With the last app I used (Out Of Milk), what finally put the nail in the coffin was the fact that very frequently, when I wanted to mark that I actually bought something that was on the list, I would accidentally move it to another category.

For instance, say we had celery on the list, I bought it, and wanted to swipe it aside to note that it was purchased. Frequently, I would accidentally swipe it from one category to another--say from produce to frozen food.

Anyway, after getting annoyed with, and deleting that app, I searched for a replacement. Nothing appealed to me, though.

So I decided to see what I could do with just using Google Sheets, on my phone. Google Sheets is pretty full-functioned for an online spreadsheet, and I thought I could make it work.

Here's how I set it up:

- I have a Google Sheet called Master Grocery List, that I share with my husband.

The important columns on the sheet are GroceryItem, NeedToBuy, and EricOrSylvia. In the above picture, we need to buy canola oil, and it's assigned to Sylvia. When I set this up this Google Sheet, I added all the grocery items that we normally buy. I have one sheet which is the "Main" sheet, which has these items.

- To create the weekly shopping list, we go through the list and figure out what we need. Those items get a "y" in the NeedToBuy column. Then we also go through and enter who it's assigned to ("e" or "s" for Eric or Sylvia).

- Then I go to my data views, called Sylvia and Eric. I have 2 data views set up. Data views are very flexible filters that you can set up for Google Sheets.  The data view called Sylvia only shows those items from the Main sheet with the NeedToBuy set to "y", and the EricOrSylvia set to "s". When I switch to that data view, I see only the items which are assigned to me. Eric's is the same, except only showing those items assigned to him.

- I copy the data from the data views to separate sheets, one for Eric, and one for Sylvia. The reason for this is that the Google Sheet app on my phone can't do data views. Data views can only be done on the desktop version.

- Then we go shopping! We take separate carts, which makes things much faster. To mark that I've put something in the cart, I thought I'd be able to easily delete the item from the sheet (my sheet, not the main sheet). That ended up taking multiple steps on my phone. So instead, since making an item bold or unbold was very easy to do on the phone, just one tap, I just do that--make everything bold to begin with, and then unbold items as I put them in the grocery cart.

Voila! It was a lot of fun to come up with this process, and makes creating the grocery list, and grocery shopping much quicker.