My wife has struggled to put together all Mom’s recipes and has them in word format now. My question is whether there is some recipe software that will allow her to import her data, dress up with titles and an index, and allow her to burn copies to send to family that they can easily open and use. I had to download a compatibility file to view on my pc with word2003 and don’t want others to have that problem.
Thanks
Try MasterCook deluxe 9.0. It has an import assistant that allows recipes in clear text. A lot of my recipes are in Word so I do a copy and paste and it imports them fairly well, and you may need to do some tweaking. It does not provide a burn function, but I find the export and mail to be adequate. I hope this helps.
Just a word of caution from the voice of experience. Back your recipes up and have a printed copy of your important ones. I once spent some time adding recipes to a cooking program and didn’t back up and didn’t print out and my hard drive failed. Ouch.
I always print a hard copy of my recipes. It’s good that I do that because I had a hard drive to crash too.
If ya’ go to C/net downloads, and type cooking programs into their search, you’ll find most programs out there, with descriptions and ratings. Also, some programs are free, or most have free trial periods to try them out. All are free of spyware, etc.
Happy hunting…
I can relate to the hard drive crashes because I too have had them. I have a small computer business and have replaced crashed drives, and I have been successful many times in recovering the data. I would be glad to try and recover your data if you have the old drive.
Also I recommend that folks have a second hard drive in their computer and backup there and also to an external drive. I have a third hard drive in my computer and make yet another backup. It has been great because I put Outlook on the second drive and backup up to the third drive. If I get a virus and have to re-install the operating system I do not lose my contacts and emails. It is very unlikely that 2 hard drives would crash at the same time, and I have never seen that happen. Another good thing is the viruses, trojans, and spyware always attack the C: drive. I have never had any attacks on the D: and E: drives so my data was never lost. If you let Word save to the default it places your word docs on the C: drive and that is not good. There have been times when I was unable to recover the word docs, spreadsheets, etc. for a client on the C: drive. I have been working with personal computers for 25 years, so I have experienced a lot.
Another thing you do is backup online. McAfee offers this function as part of the virus protection suite. Also you can use dropbox which is to share large files with your friends that are too big to email, and the files are stored on its server. And I think Google also offers an online backup for free.