Mastercook 15 Recipe PC

I have been looking for something to replace MyRecipeBox on my iPad as I need something that has cross platform support and synchs my cookbooks between devices. I had high hopes for this product, as it has been around for many years and people seem to love it. I was utterly dismayed when I installed Mastercook 15 on my PC and launched it. The UI looks like something from the 1990s. The graphics are horrendous. It is kludgy to use, and NOT intuitive AT ALL. One would think Home would take you to your library of cookbooks, allow you to add/look up a recipe, maybe show some recent recipes that were accessed/added. You know. Those things that are the MOST COMMON, REGULAR tasks that you would want to do. But no...it takes you to a screen with links to uncommon/one time activities such as download the iOS mobile app, import from previous versions, create a Group Cookbook, and tutorials. Seriously??

My wife love it

A very long time ago I used Mastercook and then switched over to Living Cook because their software was so much easier to utilize. Then came the day when LC disappeared and I had nearly 2K of recipes that I could not access. I read that Mastercook would convert those recipes so I bought it. Big mistake. You have to send your recipes to their customer service department if the conversion process didnt work. It didnt. What a pain!! Then came the problem of trying to simply print out a recipe onto a 5x8 card. The convoluted steps I had to go through for each recipe has completely soured me on Mastercook. The best I could do for printing is portrait and I prefer landscape. I have been so completely disgusted by this software that I no longer try to use it for collecting recipes. Why bother. I just use it for the recipes that do not have nutritional information. So I am once more looking for new software.

The programs user interface hasnt been updated since 2000 and on modern monitors the text is teeny tiny and cramped (see screencap). Theres no way to increase the text size for the main program except to use Windows 10s built-in scaling, which makes all your other programs HUGE. The companys customer service isnt helpful at all, insisting that it isnt a MasterCook problem and that I should just use Windowss built-in scaling to make their interface readable. Im not even using a particularly high resolution monitor (1920x1080), but according to their customer service rep the program is optimized for 1024x768, which hasnt been the most common resolution since 2006. (You can adjust the text size for recipes youre viewing and/or printing, so I have no idea why its so hard for them to do the same for the main interface!)

What I didnt like was it would not load on my laptop. Had to have a tech load on thumb drive for it to work.

I purchased this item to record and print my recipes. After a great deal of work, I was finally able to get the program to display the recipes as I wanted them displayed. All I wanted was a list of the ingredients over a list of the steps to create the recipe. I also wanted this information in sufficiently large type that I could easily read it. This is not much to ask for, but it took about four hours to create this format. Then, when I went to print the recipe it would not follow the format that I had created. Instead, the program had its own format that was not at all like what I had formatted for the recipes in which it printed the recipe. If I wanted to have my recipes printed in the format I had designed I would need to spend more time formatting the printing template. At that point, I decided I would simply design my own recipe program using Word and Excel. It is much easier and cheaper that MasterCook. Do not waste your money on this product.

I couldnt get the trial version to work and I contacted customer support. They were so helpful. If you are running Windows 10 with Edge, you have to do a couple of things before it will import recipes from the internet. Once they helped me figure out the problem and fix it, I went ahead and bought the program. It makes cookbooks the way you want to, and copies a recipe so easily. I love the program.

I love this program. It is easy to learn to use and the tech support is wonderful. Pam was quick to respond to my questions and her answers were easy to follow. I would recommend you purchase this program.

This program does everything I wanted it to do.

This version of MasterCook replaced an older version. My only problem is that the images I use in the recipes disappear and are replaced by a Pictures on CD statement. That is most aggravating when you have as many recipes as I do. While customer service has tried to help, nothing has worked.