If you were considering digitizing your recipes, I would recommend looking at “Living Cookbook 2013”, if you use Windows. I recently researched some different software options and have been extremely pleased with my purchase. The software does a good job of capturing online recipes, exceeding my expectations. This will allow me to throw out many hard-copy recipes, have a well-organized recipe collection as well as provide us with access to epicurious.com and other online recipes when we don’t have online access.
What I liked about the software is: 1) very intuitive and easy to use; 2) functionality exceeded my expectations and it provides options/functionality not offered by other vendors (IMHO); 3) calculates nutritional information for the recipe.
I purchased the software from Amazon, but you can purchase it directly from the vendor and/or download their 30-day trial version for the LivingCookBook website.
I started my recipe digitizing by capturing information within Word documents – but that was getting old fast and I knew would be annoying to use longer-term (i.e., Living Cookbook takes the same or less time to capture recipes; recipes are better organized/searchable; have the added benefit of displaying nutritional information, if desired).
Edit by moderator: Activated link to epicurious website and corrected some spelling. (Sorry, couldn't resist the corrections.) Terry [Terry, Thanks. Lyn] -- Edited by Terry and Jo on Saturday 10th of August 2013 10:22:32 PM
-- Edited by Lyn on Sunday 11th of August 2013 06:58:06 AM
Ckerr said
01:44 AM Aug 11, 2013
Ditto! I love Living Cookbook. Their tech support is also great. I've had change computers 3 times since I bought it and every time I just call and they give me a new install code.
Besides making recipes easier to find / scale up or down, it also allows you put a picture and you can easily create a nicely formatted cookbook out of your recipes. I'm thinking of doing that for my niece who is getting married next fall.
NWescapee said
02:23 AM Aug 11, 2013
So, if I have some recipes I've scanned, others that are bookmarked "favorites", will it capture all of these? How does it interact with any cookbooks where we've purchased the Kindle edition?
I'm trying to get organized with recipes and at our old house we had an entire bookshelf FULL of cookbooks. Those have all now been donated, with favorite recipes scanned first, other than this 5-7 cookbooks we decided to bring along. Since then we've purchased several Kindle books and I have tons of bookmarked recipes. Love the idea of getting everything organized.
Ckerr said
04:21 AM Aug 11, 2013
If I remember correctly you can basically insert a link for the bookmarked recipes. Or alternatively, what I usually do is copy the recipe and paste it into Living Cookbook. What you do is paste it in a text box and then label the parts of the recipe -- ingredients, directions, servings, source, etc. Sometimes it took a little clean up, but it helped refresh my memory about recipes doing it this way.
For the scanned recipes you might want to purchase a software program that converts the scanned doc to a text doc that is editable. I can't think what they are called right now, but they are not too expensive. Once it's a text doc you can do the copy and paste exercise. It really doesn't take too long to make all the recipes look great and easily found.
One of the advantages of actually converting all the recipes to Living Cookbook is that you can easily scan them to serve more or less and you can easily create a shopping list including multiple recipes. Nice when you love to cook and try new things.
There are certainly cheaper ways to go, but for someone who loves cookbooks like you and I do, I think it's worth the investment of both time and money.
Terry and Jo said
05:26 AM Aug 11, 2013
Carol,
I'm not really fluent with scanners, but is that feature called OCR (Optical Character Recognition) that allows one to scan an image into editable text?
Terry
Lynn and Ed said
07:23 AM Aug 11, 2013
Ckerr wrote:
.. what I usually do is copy the recipe and paste it into Living Cookbook. What you do is paste it in a text box and then label the parts of the recipe -- ingredients, directions, servings, source, etc. ..
I have used the above approach, which is easy. Additionally, I have found that many of my online recipes were available via the "one-click download" from Living Cookbook's Internet navigator -- in other words, in one-click relevant information is automatically populated into the correct categories (e.g., ingredients, directions, servings) with no/minimal clean up needed.
If you think you might have an interest, I would suggest leveraging their 30-day free trial (that link is in my initial post).
Regarding Kindle cookbooks, I do not plan to include my Kindle cookbook recipes within the software. I might rethink that if I decide to use the software's shopping list and calendar planning functionality. However, I have unfortunately found that many of our cookbooks are not available electronically, so I will scan/capture some recipes from those cookbooks within my Living Cookbook.
-- Edited by Lyn on Sunday 11th of August 2013 09:17:59 AM
If you were considering digitizing your recipes, I would recommend looking at “Living Cookbook 2013”, if you use Windows. I recently researched some different software options and have been extremely pleased with my purchase. The software does a good job of capturing online recipes, exceeding my expectations. This will allow me to throw out many hard-copy recipes, have a well-organized recipe collection as well as provide us with access to epicurious.com and other online recipes when we don’t have online access.
What I liked about the software is: 1) very intuitive and easy to use; 2) functionality exceeded my expectations and it provides options/functionality not offered by other vendors (IMHO); 3) calculates nutritional information for the recipe.
I purchased the software from Amazon, but you can purchase it directly from the vendor and/or download their 30-day trial version for the LivingCookBook website.
I started my recipe digitizing by capturing information within Word documents – but that was getting old fast and I knew would be annoying to use longer-term (i.e., Living Cookbook takes the same or less time to capture recipes; recipes are better organized/searchable; have the added benefit of displaying nutritional information, if desired).
Edit by moderator: Activated link to epicurious website and corrected some spelling. (Sorry, couldn't resist the corrections.) Terry [Terry, Thanks. Lyn]
-- Edited by Terry and Jo on Saturday 10th of August 2013 10:22:32 PM
-- Edited by Lyn on Sunday 11th of August 2013 06:58:06 AM
Ditto! I love Living Cookbook. Their tech support is also great. I've had change computers 3 times since I bought it and every time I just call and they give me a new install code.
Besides making recipes easier to find / scale up or down, it also allows you put a picture and you can easily create a nicely formatted cookbook out of your recipes. I'm thinking of doing that for my niece who is getting married next fall.
I'm trying to get organized with recipes and at our old house we had an entire bookshelf FULL of cookbooks. Those have all now been donated, with favorite recipes scanned first, other than this 5-7 cookbooks we decided to bring along. Since then we've purchased several Kindle books and I have tons of bookmarked recipes. Love the idea of getting everything organized.
For the scanned recipes you might want to purchase a software program that converts the scanned doc to a text doc that is editable. I can't think what they are called right now, but they are not too expensive. Once it's a text doc you can do the copy and paste exercise. It really doesn't take too long to make all the recipes look great and easily found.
One of the advantages of actually converting all the recipes to Living Cookbook is that you can easily scan them to serve more or less and you can easily create a shopping list including multiple recipes. Nice when you love to cook and try new things.
There are certainly cheaper ways to go, but for someone who loves cookbooks like you and I do, I think it's worth the investment of both time and money.
Carol,
I'm not really fluent with scanners, but is that feature called OCR (Optical Character Recognition) that allows one to scan an image into editable text?
Terry
I have used the above approach, which is easy. Additionally, I have found that many of my online recipes were available via the "one-click download" from Living Cookbook's Internet navigator -- in other words, in one-click relevant information is automatically populated into the correct categories (e.g., ingredients, directions, servings) with no/minimal clean up needed.
If you think you might have an interest, I would suggest leveraging their 30-day free trial (that link is in my initial post).
Regarding Kindle cookbooks, I do not plan to include my Kindle cookbook recipes within the software. I might rethink that if I decide to use the software's shopping list and calendar planning functionality. However, I have unfortunately found that many of our cookbooks are not available electronically, so I will scan/capture some recipes from those cookbooks within my Living Cookbook.
-- Edited by Lyn on Sunday 11th of August 2013 09:17:59 AM