Customer Reviews

MasterCook Deluxe 7 - 5,000 delicious recipes

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I guess you could say I'm a cooking software aficionado. I've been watching this industry for many years. I've seen products come and go.

MasterCook is a pretty good product but since Sierra sold it to ValuSoft a couple years ago, my confidence in it has declined significantly.

ValuSoft is just out to make a buck. The only technical support they offer is via e-mail. They are milking the brand for all it's worth and when they can't get anything else out of it, they will discard it like they have done with all their other old titles.

It's not that they're a bad company, that's just their business model. They buy old products that have some value, they repackage them so they look "new and improved" and sell them at deep discounts until they don't sell anymore. They're not truly committed to the cooking software category.

"As long as the software works well, what does it matter?" is probably what you're thinking right now, right? That's what many people thought before Windows XP came out. But they were very sad to find that their MasterCook software did not work on Windows XP. After spending hours and hours entering their own recipes they suddenly found that they were unable to run the MasterCook program on their new Windows XP computers.

Over a year later, Sierra fixed the compatibility problem in order to sell the product to ValuSoft but what happens when the next Operating System comes out?

Before you spend a lot of time entering in your own recipes into MasterCook, I highly recommend that you take a look at some of the other options out there.

In my opinion, the Cook'n Software by DVO is the best. The interface is a bit dated but the company is totally committed to cooking software. They are constantly enhancing the software and they post updates regularly and let you download them for free.

There are some other good products on the Internet as well like the Living Cookbook but they're not as secure as DVO. They're relatively new and still have yet to prove themselves.

That's my opinion...for what it's worth. I hope this helps somebody. It's probably more than you ever wanted to know...but when you consider the amount of time it takes to key in all those recipes, I figure it's better to get the scoop up front rather than find out after the fact.

Whatever you decide to do, organizing your recipes on the computer is FAR better than any other paper method. If you've never tried an electronic cookbook before, you're going to LOVE IT!

This is essentially the review I posted for their sister-product, MasterCook Deluxe Low Carb. I've spent 3 days researching the heck out of cooking software, and maybe I can save you some effort ... or at least give some food for thought. I want to upgrade from my 3.5" disk of MasterCook II (2.7) version from 1993.

Sierra sold the MasterCook line to ValuSoftware a few years ago, a company with questionable practices based on all the internet research I've observed recently. A lot of what I've read indicates that if you decide to go with MasterCook, you're better off springing for the two bills more and getting MasterCook Deluxe, not the LowCarb version of it. Deluxe has everything that LowCarb has (except 11 recipes that are only in LowCarb), plus thousands of regular recipes, should you ever need one. You can filter Deluxe to return just the Low Carb recipes results. It appears the LowCarb product was a fast remarketing ploy by ValuSoft to make some quick bucks on current trends, without hardly doing anything but filtering existing software.

I've also read on the internet that ValuSoft tends to buy up software, sell it cheap, sell it only until the sales decline, then abandons the product. It doesn't sound like much is ever done for future enhancements. Not good, if it's true.

Of significant note for me as a low carber of over 5 years, before it got trendy, is that the MasterCook line doesn't break out sugars from the carb nutritional analysis reporting.

I'm strongly considering "Living Cookbook" instead, a much newer program, but with some really active development going on, and easy communication with the actual software developer. There's an online demo I checked out, a free 25-use trial, and continual updates for no extra fee (even entire whole number version updates). It reports carbs, net carbs (and sugar, sugar alcohol and fiber). It looks pretty attractive to me. (I don't think it can be any riskie than going with ValuSoft's MasterCook program at this point.)

Alternatively, there's another line you might look at ... Cook'n, which offers a low carb version that's probably better than what MasterCook has to offer as far as the recipes offered anyway.

MasterCook has a huge following, but I don't know that it can be sustained now that it's under the control of ValuSoft ... or if it will be around for long. I'd be ... CAUTIOUS, if you intend to invest a lot of time into cooking software data entry.

Although it's not a replacement for recipe "books", this is a great tool if you collect recipes from the Internet, or need to analyze the nutritional contents of a recipe. You can also scale recipes, add your own ingredients including nutritional values, print shopping lists, search recipes by ingredient, create your own cookbooks, and categorize recipes.

There is also a daily meal planner. You can input what you ate all day, and the program will tell you the nutrition values of a particular meal, or for the entire day. This comes in handy if you're on a diet, or you need to watch intakes such as calcium, iron or B12.

Highly recommended!

I have been using software to organize my recipes for many years. It is so handy to search for specific ingredients, change the number of servings, and print off a recipe to use in the kitchen so that I don't expose my cookbooks to grease and spills.

Over the years, I tried many different products and found problems with each that made them difficult to use. As recipe software products failed to support new Windows versions, I had to move on to other, newer products.

Why I didn't try MasterCook until last year, I don't know. I KNEW that it was the most commonly used recipe software and that many web sites contained MasterCook-compatible recipes that could be directly loaded into MasterCook, but somehow I thought it wasn't "fancy" enough.

Boy was I wrong! When my hard disk crashed and I ended up having to install Windows 2000 instead of Windows 98, I found my old recipe software would not load onto Windows 2000. The only software I could find that would was MasterCook, so I bought it.

When I think how easy MasterCook is to use, and how the old products I had used over the years were so difficult, I could kick myself for not switching over years ago!

MasterCook is stable, works great, and is so easy to use that I never looked at the documentation!

Best of all, it allows me to organize over 800 of my own recipes, as well as make use of the hundreds of recipes that came with it!

It figures out all the nutritional information for every recipe. I never realized how useful that would be now that we are all watching our carbs and fat! This allows me to "tweak" recipes and instantly see how changes affect fat and carbohydrate grams.

The best thing of all is that the format MasterCook uses to export recipes and to make backup files is THE standard for recipe software. That means, if I DO have to move to another recipe software product in the future, I will be able to import all my recipes into the new software. (I can only emphasize how important this is by relating that over the last 20 years, when moving from one software program to another, I had to RE-TYPE over 500 recipes into new software! TWICE!) Or, even if I can't move the backup files into new software, because MasterCook stores its backups in a human-readable format, at the very least I have a readable record of my recipes.

If you want to print custom paper (like 3x5 or 4x6 index cards), be aware that this software may not work with your printer and tech support absolutely refuses to answer anything that has printer in the email.

I had V5.0 working fine and updated to V7.0. My custom 4x6 cards now print off the page with increasing indents. I had to write a helper program which takes an exported recipe and formats it into Microsoft Word in order to print.

I upgraded to this program so that I could use the PDA download for my shopping, but there's a glitch in the program that doesn't transfer fractions correctly. (I have contacted the manufacturer, and they confirmed that this is a known bug, and there is currently no fix for it.) So don't waste your money if you're thinking this is a great idea.

Years ago, when Sierra still owned MasterCook, there was a Mac version...and I LOVED it. There was even a promised upgrade, which never came through. (I believe that was about the time Sierra sold MasterCook.) My understanding is that they have no intentions of continuing the Mac version. Perhaps those people looking for the Mac version can find a used one somewhere, although it will only run in Classic mode. I'm currently looking for a cookbook program for my windows laptop, and am not sure I will support a company without active development, out of concerns of what happens when windows upgrades... But, overall, the program delivers what was promised, for now.

I have been using Master Cook 5 for probably 10 year. I have re-loaded it on two new computers. I think I did have some trouble with it at one point, but it was more of an irritation than a real problem. In any event, I now have it on my latest computer that has MS 2007 as the operating system and it's working better than ever. There are hundreds of recipes that they provide. I frequently load recipes I think might be good and like the intuitive autofill feature. I love that I can e-mail the recipes to friends and I can re-portion recipes when I don't want to make a whole recipe. I also like the fact that I can see all the nutritional info. If I think there's too much fat in a recipe, I can make an adjustment, check to see how big the change is and save the change. If you really want to use every feature in the program, you can set up your pantry, create shopping lists and get wine recommendations. There are lots of colorful pictures that I always find useful when deciding whether to use a recipe. We do eat with our eyes first and if it doesn't look good, I'm probably not going to bother. I don't know anything about other cooking software on the market, but this is well priced and it suits my needs perfectly.

THIS SOFTWARE IS EXCELLENT AND INTERESTING. I HAVE BOUGHT THE OTHER COLLECTION OF MASTERCOOK AND THEY ARE VERY USEFUL TO FIND THE RECIPES YOU WANT. THANKS VERY MUCH

As a graduate of culinary school, I was provided a software program for my computer and entered a whole heck of treasured receipes in it. Well, I did not know at the time that my ability to add, copy or change my own items would expire and that they would be more than happy to sell me another version of their product for well over $500. I could not and still can not afford such a program. I find Master Cook very user friendly, in so many ways. I can scale, export, import copy add to shopping list easier than any of the other programs I have tried. I give it a thumbs up