Customer Reviews

Living Cookbook 2008

5 star:		(63)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Ok, I have literally tried all of the cooking software out there and when I tried Living Cookbook over 2 years ago - I was hooked! It is by far the best and most amazing program for organizing your recipes in one place. It is very robust, but easy to learn... so you can use it for a few recipes or thousands! I recently upgraded to the latest version `Living Cookbook 2008' and I'm glad I did... it's fully compatible with my new Vista Laptop and I love the ability it has to customize everything (from the fonts and colors, to the recipe layout and more).

Since I started meal planning, our family has saved over $200 extra on groceries each month! And in case anyone might be wondering, we shop and eat all organically. Living Cookbook has no troubles keeping up with all my custom foods - and lets me enter in as many new ingredients as I want.

My favorite features are the Meal Planning; Inventory; and Shopping List capabilities... no more guessing when I go to the store. It literally lets me drag and drop recipes/meals to a calendar, and it will generate a shopping list of what I need to buy... but it also takes into account the inventory I already have on hand - so no unnecessary purchases! If you take the time to enter in food prices, it can also calculate shopping costs too! The only thing I'd like to see added is the ability to adjust my inventory on hand `on the fly' within the inventory table list. But Lee has assured us, that this is one of the upgrades he has planned for a near-future software update.

I must also comment on the outstanding support offered by 'Lee' (the software's developer) on the support forum. How often do you buy something and have the ability to ask questions directly from the source!? On the rare occasion when I've had a question, Lee's response time has been quicker than when I call my own Mother for help! :-)

My one warning to new users... Beware - this software is addicting! My husband recently came out of the bedroom half asleep to inform me that it was 1:30 in the morning - I had been glued to my new upgrade to Living Cookbook 2008 and was having so much fun that I didn't realized so much time had passed!

Enjoy & God Bless!

I'm a computer programmer and an avid cook, and for years I fantasized (and even tried to write) my ideal recipe database program. After admitting defeat, I rigorously explored several websites and software packages, including Now You're Cooking and BigOven, but when I got to Living Cookbook, I knew I'd found everything that I was looking for.

I don't even use the menu planning/shopping list features -- my favorite features are:

(1) It's ridiculously easy to snag recipes from websites and other sources and get them into the Living Cookbook format.

(2) If you're not interested in using a feature, it's easy to change your settings so that you don't have to see it on your recipes or exports.

(3) If you like having your recipes on paper in your kitchen, it's ridiculously easy to publish a beautiful paper cookbook with table of contents and index (this was one of my main goals) and to customize its appearance.

(4) There's incredibly clear and comprehensive documentation included in the software, as well as excellent support available on the online forums.

If you're looking for flexible, robust, well-supported recipe software, look no further. This product would be worth twice the price.

When I bought this program I was fully expecting to come back and submit a glowing 5-star review. But after using the program (pretty much every aspect of it) for about 3 months, I have to say I'm very disappointed. Depending on how you want to use the program it could be great, or it could be a total mess.

First, the good:
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If you're looking for a way to capture all your recipes from paper, organize them, and have them on hand for easy retrieval, this is your program. It has an absolutely brilliant recipe import & capture system. You paste your recipe into a little capture box, then there's a really nifty color-coded set of buttons you use to tell the program which parts of the pasted text are the title, list of ingredients, serving size, cooking procedure, etc., etc., and then it handles the rest. I used this feature extensively to transfer a ton of recipes from photo-copied cookbook pages that I scanned into my computer. Saves A LOT of typing. You'll still need to review the converted recipe to make sure it understood the 1/2 and 1/4 designations used for half and quarter measures in cups, tablespoons, etc. But for the most part, really great functionality.

The shopping list feature is also pretty good. Assign recipes and # of servings to various meals spread over as many days as you like, then tell the system to make a shopping list for all meals planned on those days. It handles the rest and gives you a list of everything you need to buy. Great.

Now the bad:
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The one huge drawback to this program comes in the area where every cooking program should be designed to excel. Meal planning. It's terrible for this. I mean really bad. Now, to be fair, it has the ability to do everything you'll need to do when it comes to planning your meals. The problem is that it's incredibly inflexible -- making it a nightmare to make small but necessary changes to your meal plan.

The way I wanted to use the program was to specify all the meals I'm going to make for the next week by assigning them to breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, & dinner for each day of the week. The problem is that the program makes this process incredibly difficult every step of the way. The best I've come up with so far is to have 2 workspace windows open at once. One to show the recipes and one to show the meal planning calendar. Then I drag and drop them from the recipe list onto the day I want to cook them.

Not so bad so far. But here's the first obstacle you'll run into. The meal planning calendar is rigid in size. When you add recipes for breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack, chances are you'll fill up the available view. So then when you add "dinner" it gets hidden below the others. You can't see it down there in the monthly calendar view because there's no scrollbar. There's a little "down arrow" that tells you there's more below, but you can't see it. So now you have to click to get the Weekly view instead of the Monthly. Depending on the day and the number of items this may or may not fix the problem. If it doesn't then you need to switch to the Day view.

Now imagine you're planning meals for the next 7 days. I guarantee you will constantly be zooming in, zooming out, wondering if you've added the "late-night snack" to this day or that day, accidentally adding meal items to the wrong meal, leaving out meals that you assumed were down in the hidden area, etc.

So that's planning mess #1. Planning mess #2 comes in when you're trying to move meals or meal items from one day to another. This happens more than you might imagine -- think what happens to your meal plan when someone invites you out for dinner... or when you miss most of the day's meals due to some unexpected circumstance. You want to move those meals to another day right? Or how about the scenario where you're not super hungry, and instead of making the two or three dishes you had planned for a meal, you make only one. You want to move those meal items to different days, right? Well this program is either full of bugs or is just a bad design when it comes to these operations. Sometimes you'd like to take your lunch items and move them to dinner for a different day. There's no simple way to do it (*sometimes you can drag and drop it, but not always*, and if the item is hidden from view, good luck!). Sometimes you try copying-and-pasting an entire meal to a different day and it just won't let you. You can't get it to go to the place where you want it. So then you have to go through the hassle of adding the meals to the day as new items.

The meal planning features are so bad that I keep putting it off knowing it's going to take several hours to layout a simple meal plan for the next week.

But the frustration doesn't stop here. There's all sorts of smaller bugs and poor design elements. The software appears to be constructed by a one-man show (as far as I can tell). This doesn't necessarily mean it will be good or bad. But as a software developer myself I know there are tendencies -- when pushed on time -- to implement new features in the simplest way possible instead of designing them properly. Some examples of poor design and other limitations:

1) When you are adding a new recipe, there's an option to add source information so you know which of your cookbooks it came from. A proper design would have a way for you to create a "Source". Then, when you are entering a recipe from the same book, you would just select the book from a list of Sources. Instead, you have the option to use the "Last source" you specified or enter new information. This means each time you enter a recipe from cookbook A, if the last recipe you added wasn't also from cookbook A, you'll have to go get the cookbook and enter the information AGAIN... and again... and again.

2) Grocery Lists: You can print them, but you can't copy-and-paste them into Word, etc. You can't search them for a given ingredient (needed when you want to know if that last 1/2 a beet is needed for one recipe or two). And the default formatting is terrible.

3) I have 18 other stumbling blocks written down that I plan to send to the software company as design improvements, but this review is already too long.

I have been using this software for a number of years , along with other recipe software. I have found myself abandoning all other software for Living Cookbook 2008 ( LC08 ) .

In these times of rising food prices , I have found that by using this software I have saved so much money on my food bill , just from meal planning.

We print out our own hard copy family cookbook and we intend to use the services of Tastebook.com which can take an LC08 file and make it into a cookbook no different than what you would buy in the store.

There are websites that can do what LC08 does but you take the risk of being banned , the site going down , your net connection going down and a host of other issues. With LC08 you can make backups and export them to a CD or a removable flash drive , you keep the control of your own recipes , menus , meal plans , shopping lists etc.

Service , Lee ( the programmer ) doesn't brush you off. He works so hard to fix issues , answer questions and improve the program . Unlike other programs that are more interested in becoming a social network.

I honestly can not hit on every topic that makes LC08 a great program , download a free trial for yourself from the Livingcookbook website and be sure to check out the capture and scan features. Capture is the ability to copy and past a recipe into the program via a few clicks. The scan feature allows you to save old paper copies of family recipes , into an image , which you can view from within the program.

I hope you enjoy LC08 as much as I do.

Living Cookbook 2008

I bought Living Cookbook 2005 2 years ago after extensive research into all the cooking applications available. The reviews for Living Cookbook were great then and 2008 is even better. I upgraded to 2008 this last Xmas and am even more impressed with this version. I am a professional Web and User Interface designer, so I'm more critical than most users would be. Let me tell you why this application is so good:

ENTER RECIPES QUICKLY
New recipes are very easy to enter. The feature I like best is Recipe Capture. Copy any recipe from the internet, or your own text file, and then paste it into a field under the Capture Tab. To copy the ingredients to the Ingredients Tab, highlight that text and press the Ingredients button. Voila! All the ingredients are copied to the Quantity, Unit, & Ingredient columns. What has just been copied is highlighted in a color so you know it's completed. Copying the procedures and all the other recipe information is equally easy. Highlight the text and click on the button name that matches the information.

Entering recipes is flexible. Scan in your recipe collection or favorites from cookbooks. (You do need to supply the scanner.) Import them from other software that use Food Data Exchange, MasterCook, Meal Master, or text file formats. Copy recipes using the Capture tab. Alternatively, manually add recipes using the Autofill feature. A few characters and the software fills in the rest. It will even fill in the Quantity and Unit from the Ingredients field if you enable Pen Scanning. (This is one my only quibbles in terms of UI: It's not a logical location to enable the feature even though it was created to make pen scanning easier.)

PLAN MEALS EASILY
Whether you're planning for a party or the family's weekly dinners, select the recipe you want and add it to a Menu file. Scale the recipes to the number of guests. Create a Shopping List with all the menu ingredients totaled and organized by store and by category. It even tells you the cost of each item. (I haven't verified if the cost matches our expensive region, but it should give you an idea of how much the weekly meals will cost.) You can even keep an inventory of what you have on hand. Planning takes no time at all with no extra trips to the grocery store.

FIND RECIPES FAST
Key word tags (Recipe Type): Add a tag from the existing list or add your own tag to recipes you enter. Some examples of my personal key words are Holiday, Family, Low Fat, each season (spring, summer, fall, and winter to take advantage of seasonal ingredients).

Search makes finding recipe categories very quick. Got an aunt who is vegetarian, and allergic to nuts, wheat, and dairy products? Use the Advanced Search and pick up to 4 key words (Recipe Types), include or exclude whatever ingredients, and you have a list of possible recipes. No more browsing many cookbooks, searching each chapter for recipes that fit multiple needs. This feature is useful for grocery store sale items and or the apples you need to use, so you can save money too.

Click on a cookbook folder and recipes are listed showing the Name, Rate (5 stars, 2 stars) Difficulty, Type (key words). That makes scanning to find the right recipe is easy.

MAKE IT YOUR OWN
Create your own cookbooks. I made a "Family Favorites" cookbook, created CDs and gave them to my family for Christmas along with a copy of the software. We can email recipes to each other so sharing is a breeze. I also have a cookbook called "Try Me" for all those recipes I've collected over the years that I've wanted to test. No more newspaper articles to laboriously leaf through. Another cookbook I created is "Company's Coming" for the times I entertain and want recipes that are easy, but elegant.

You can organize recipes or menus however it suits you. I created folders for Appetizers, Beverages, Breads, Desserts, Eggs & Cheese, Entrees, First Courses, Sauces & Marinades. I made subfolders for some categories - like Entrees are split into Beef, Poultry, etc.

IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH
Each recipe automatically calculates nutritional values so you know what's in it. This is invaluable for diabetics, hypertension, or just to lose weight.

RESPONSIVE SUPPORT
If you can't find the answer in the Help files or Tutorials, LC has a Discussion Forum covering most topics. I added 2 questions to an existing thread and got answers back within 24 hours.

There a more great features, but this review is too long already. If you aren't persuaded by now how great the software is, reading more probably won't change your mind.

I've made 2 cookbooks now, and each time I show them, no one can believe that they are my own recipes, and not just printed off the web customizable comment section on the recipe is the only way that someone can tell I didn't just steal the recipe! It's amazing what using this software and printing on good quality paper does - it looks absolutely professional quality. The software is easy to use, easy to install, and you can set it to back up your collection every time you exit the application. I take a recipe I find online or see on TV, I make it, and then record my changes and make it my own. I plan on using this software to create the cookbook I plan on passing onto my kids. I have to say though, not only is this an excellent application created by a small, proud company, the incredible product support (directly from the developer) on their forums and the supportive community dedicated to Living Cookbook is what sets this application apart from all others. It literally is the only software I would pay for.

I have hundreds, probably thousands of recipes, mostly from magazines that I have collected over the past 10 years. For all 10 of those years, I have been experimenting with the best way to organize all of these recipes. I had gotten so far as organizing them in to recipes I've tried and recipes I haven't. However, I found I very seldom looked at my binders containing the recipes I hadn't tried. What's the point of collecting them if you never use them? So I knew I needed a way to store them together, but still know which ones had been tried and which ones I hadn't. I also knew I wanted a powerful search engine tool. What if I knew I would only have 20 minutes each night that week for dinner? What if I really didn't feel like using the oven that night, and wanted something grilled? What if I want to go low-fat this week? What if I decided to implement a Monday is burger night, Tuesday is casserole night type system - how could I organize my recipes to make that type of system easy to implement? I started doing some basic research and decided on LC08.
After 24 hours, here are my impressions:
-I did not have any issues whatsoever with the registration. Perhaps that has been remedied. I had downloaded the trial version and simply entered the registration code sent to me in the email the day after I ordered.
-It is not exactly intuitive. I had to refer to the help menu for nearly everything I wanted to do at first. On the other hand, I was always able to find my desired topic in the help menu, and was always able to follow the directions and complete the task on the first attempt. (For reference, I consider myself average on the "computer literacy" scale.)
-I really like the way nutrition is automatically calculated. Not all ingredients are pre-loaded of course, but I was able to figure out how to add ingredients, and as I add more and more ingredients [...], the more complete further automatic computations will be. I really like the fact that I won't have to figure out the nutrition for each recipe from scratch as I have been doing for the past couple years.
-I have been able to figure out how to do the searches I wanted to be able to run. It will be able to do everything I wanted it to do. This was the biggie. After I figured this out, I knew I would be keeping the software.
-I like the fact you can "flag" recipes. There are 6 different colored flags that can mean whatever you want them to. I plan on having a flag for "Looks REALLY good - must try ASAP!" Might also use these flags to indicate which ones we've tried already.
-The "capture" feature for importing recipes from the internet works very well and makes for very quick work of this task.
-I now realize I am faced with purchasing additional software referred to as OCR software in order to "capture" recipes from a scan (for all the magazine clippings). I am not really surprised by this and will probably be worth the extra $$.
-Customizing the final format is very easy, as is adding an image.

I've used several cookbook programs. Now Your Cooking which also has great support, Big Oven and Master Cook. When I found LCOOKBOOK 205 they all went in the trash heap. LCOOKBOOK 208 is even better. I think your program and support is head and shoulders above any of the others I've tried.

Thanks for a great product.

I rarely pay for software and then only after I have tried it. The trial gives plenty of time to realise this program is worth the money. I purchsed 2005 version and then updated to 2008, and actually paid for both versions. This is the first recipe program I have kept using. I am now filling it with all my recipes and throwing out the books!

Although very definitely an american program it is easy to use with metric measures, and has ingredients from all over the world in it. Its easy to change ingredient names to the ones you know etc.

The capture feature makes it take less than a minute to get a new recipe into it from the internet etc. I have entered hundreds of recipes into it. It's a great way of keeping all those recipes you see on TV that you would like to try one day!!

If you are looking for software for your recipes try this one first. It does everything you want and is so easy to use, navigate, search and prints great looking cookbooks.

I'm a long-time user of recipe software to keep my recipes organized on my computer but Living Cookbook excels and exceeds expectations that I ever had:

@ Keeps recipes more organized than any recipe card approach I've ever used (I'm an avid recipe collector so I've created a variety of chapters);

@ Allows easy and quick system for "capturing" recipes and translating them into the Living Cookbook format (as a recipe collector, the days of paper copies of recipes littering my cookbook shelves are over);

@ Allows shopping list creation based on recipe ingredients;

@ Support from Radium Technologies staff (Lee Grainger never sleeps!) and users can answer any technical problem ever likely to arise;

I have not come close to using all of its features(the ingredient database allows even more flexibility than I can even imagine) Anyone using a computer, an OCR and a printer for their recipe collection will not be disappointed!!!