Shop'NCook shopping list and recipe management software

Shop'NCook Pro 3.4.2 User's Manual

Getting started
Shopping List
Database Editor
Sublists
Sublist Editor
Recipes
Cookbooks
Recipe Import/Export
Recipe Editor
Nutritional Analysis
Direct Access
Menus & Meal Planner
Costing
Browser
Preferences
Troubleshooting
Search

Getting Started...

Shop'NCook Pro is a software to organize your grocery shopping and cooking. Shopping lists are composed in seconds by clicking on items or adding from recipes and sublists. A comprehensive database of grocery items makes it easy to write shopping lists right from the start. The recipe manager lets you access, search and scale conveniently your recipes and compute the nutritional information. With the menu and meal planner feature, you can organize your meals just by dropping recipes on a calendar and make a library of menus. A function allows you to estimate the cost of your grocery list and recipes. An incorporated browser and direct access to The Recipe Database are powerful tools to find and import recipes from the web.

Overview

The software is formed of six panes:

Shopping List pane - To write shopping lists and edit the database of grocery items
Sublists pane - An alternative way to compose shopping lists
Recipes pane - To organize your recipes
Direct Access pane - To access The Recipe Database online
Menu pane - To view the menus and add menu ingredients to the shopping list
Browser pane - To import recipes and cookbooks from internet

Additionally, a drawer on the left that you can hide or show at will contains the Calendar and the Menus tabs to plan your meal and organize your library of menus.

First time use

The first time you use Shop'NCook Pro after installing, you are asked if you want to use the default item database or import from another version of the software. If you have been using Shop'NCook 3.1, you should choose to import. You will be prompted to locate the "Shop'NCook 3.1" folder where the previous version was installed. The software will then import your item database and recipes. It will also give you the possibility to update your item database with the new additions from the default database. If you are a first time user of Shop'NCook, choose to use the default database.

If you use the default database, you are given the option to import a database of cost. You can choose among the available databases to get a quick start with the costing functions.

Setup of the software

To get the most out of your software, it is recommended that you do the following customisations:

import cookbooks and recipe archives from the Internet;
download the index of The Recipe Database (only for registered users);
customize the shopping list to include in the main list the grocery items you use frequently, sort the categories according to the aisles of your supermarket and input the cost data;
open the preferences panel and adjust the settings for the shopping lists, recipes, printing and nutritional information according to your needs.

Important notes

About selection: Where allowed, you can select consecutive items or recipes by clicking on the first one, then clicking on the last one with the SHIFT-key pressed. You can select several non-consecutive recipes by pressing on the CONTROL-key on Windows or the COMMAND-key on Mac OS X while selecting the recipes with the mouse.
About navigation in tables: You can navigate horizontally in tables using the TAB and SHIFT-TAB keys, and vertically by using the UP and DOWN arrows.
About pull-down menus: At several places in the software, combo pull-down menus are used. These are pull-down menu where you can either choose an item among the menu or input an arbitrary value. To input a new value, click on the field of the pull-down menu and type the new value.