i am costing a menu but i want my excel sheet to get data from a seperate price list database

A clean way to handle this is to keep your price list as a structured table and pull values into your recipe sheets using lookups rather than manual entry.

For example, if your price list sheet has product names, unit cost, and units, you can use XLOOKUP (or VLOOKUP in older Excel versions) to automatically return the cost when you type the ingredient name in the recipe sheet. This keeps pricing consistent and avoids duplication.

I’ve used this approach when analyzing real menu datasets where prices change frequently, and it scales well as the menu grows. Here’s a public menu structure I referenced while testing similar lookup logic as an example dataset:
https://dbrosmenu.com/

The key is making sure product names are standardized across sheets so the lookup functions don’t break.