AccuChef Reviewer's Comments

AccuChef 6.6 offers a trial version to access the program up to 60 times—try it before you buy it. We did and were disappointed in the format and the navigation. This is one of the few programs reviewed that is compatible with Windows Vista.

Ease of Use:  

Navigation is difficult. Select a recipe and it opens in a separate window, no easy back and forth here. AccuChef is an Excel spreadsheet, so if you are adept with Excel, your skills will be helpful with this program. 

Recipe Manager:  

Recipe search is primarily alphabetical by recipe name rather than main ingredient, which makes finding a recipe difficult. Searching by main ingredient on the filter form produced erratic results. 

Menu Planner:  

Through AccuChef's meal planner you can highlight recipes and add them to a specific day. This is a tedious process compared to the higher ranked programs that do the same thing with a drag and drop feature. Recipes added to the menu planner are “Marked”. Clicking on the shopping list button will add all marked recipes to the shopping list. Also on the menu planner is a “Process” button that will add like items together to make shopping for your ingredients more convenient. AccuChef will calculate the estimated cost of a recipe in total and per serving. However, many common items do not have cost information like olive oil, rosemary and garlic cloves—you’ll have to input a cost for each item before this function is useful.  

Feature Set:  

There are approximately 200 recipes in the original software and you can download up to 2 billion according to AccuChef. Each recipe contains notes—clearly these recipes have been tested—and the personal anecdotes are engaging.

Assign up to 15 categories per recipe to increase the flexibility of your searches. Calculate the nutrional values of your recipes with one click.

Bonus Features

• Print double-sided cookbooks with table of contents, headers and footers
• Thesaurus in addition to the spell checker
• Web page creation
• Access recipes from your cell phone 

Ease of Installation:  

The installation was slow. Upon start-up, you’ll see a disclaimer that says AccuChef is not responsible for any damages resulting from the use of this product and you are purchasing the program "As Is." 

Help/Support:  

AccuChef has a tips section, free updates, helpful tutorial videos to show you how to use the program, and email support. 

Summary:  

AccuChef is difficult to use. Recipe archiving is a time-consuming task, there is no need to make it more so. See TopTenREVIEWS side-by-side comparison chart for alternatives.