# Excel Management or Google Docs?



## ramsey80 (Nov 20, 2013)

How do you keep all your recipes in order at close hand? When ever i get a recipe i  always put it into excel, but i'm now with all these cool apps coming out i'm finding it hard to make a decision which one to use... any ideas plz?

Thnx


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## petemccracken (Sep 18, 2008)

There are numerous recipe management software options available, ranging in price from zero (Excel spreadsheets/Word documents to Access systems) through low ($5->$30), moderate and high.

What is most important in my mind, is what do you want your choice of system to do?

If it is simply to collect recipes for printing out later, Excel or Word can do the job.

If you want to search, sort, and scale recipes, perhaps a more dedicated application is better.

Adding in nutritional analysis, recipe costing, vendor pricing/ordering, and you need to start looking at some higher priced applications.

Clearly define WHAT you want to accomplish before you start your search.

For MY work as a personal chef, I like the features of Mastercook (http://www.mastercook.com) as it provides for separate cookbooks, easy exporting, a variety of print options, customizable nutritional analysis, customizable recipe costing, recipe scaling, easy searching by ingredient(s), nutritional characteristics, cuisines, ratings, categories, etc., and it only costs about $20, however it is designed for PCs though versions for other operating systems are in the works. Others prefer Living Cookbook, or a number of others.


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