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BigOven Deluxe Inspired Cooking, our TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award winning cookbook and recipe software, has a dynamic online cookbook and it works with an iPad and iPhone app so you can take your recipes and grocery lists shopping with you.

BigOven is compatible with MasterCook and Cook'n programs, which makes importing recipes from other sources simple, particularly since the software facilitates this process. Recipe boxes, menu planning, nutritional analysis of healthy recipes, and grocery lists combine with the resources of 55,000 participating cooks and 150,000 recipes. And the program's interface is also seamless. BigOven is an excellent software package for all kinds of cooks.

Ease of Use:

The program provides easy-to-use navigation. Explore on your own, and refer to its tutorial if you get stuck. However, the tutorial leans to the computer programmer instead of the cook.

BigOven comes with six cookbooks, called "recipe boxes," which include:

1. Crockpot
2. Grains
3. Low-Carb
4. Mixed Drinks
5. Standard
6. WeightWatchers

With a click, switch from Recipe Boxes to Cuisines, Main Ingredients or Course. And you can easily drag-and-drop recipes from box to box. However, the email function requires setting up outgoing email (SMTP), not information most people have at their fingertips. You can still copy and paste recipes into an email, but the online portion of the program will not be able to keep a record of the recipes you share.

Tip: Don't look for the save button when you are adding or editing; BigOven Inspired Cooking saves as you go.

Recipe Manager:

You can add new recipes to the software in four different ways:

1. Type in your recipe manually.
2. Search BigOven's Archive or import from BigOven.com.
3. Import any recipe in the MealMaster, MasterCook or Cook'n format.
4. Copy and paste the text from any MS Word document, text file or HTML screen.

Under the edit tab in each recipe, you can scale the ingredients to fit the number of servings you need and rate each recipe by taste, look, difficulty level, and cost. You can also categorize recipes by cuisine type.

Menu Planner:

The BigOven Deluxe Inspired Cooking meal planner is easy to use. Simply click on the calendar to create a meal plan for that day. The screen has four areas: breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks/other. Drag and drop healthy recipes to assign them to a meal. Add notes such as "low-cal day" or "birthday."

Shopping lists are just as easy to create. Drag a recipe to the shopping list, and it will automatically create the list for you. It even arranges the items by aisle to make shopping quick and easy. There is a combine feature, but it did not seem to work the way it should. For example, an egg yolk and an egg should be combined to make two eggs, but the software still indicated two separate entries. If you want the nutritional facts for each recipe, you must link the ingredient lines with the USDA nutritional database that is supplied. You'll have to do this for each new recipe.

Feature Set:

The healthy recipes come from users and many of the recipes are rated, but check the number of ratings to get a more accurate sense of popularity. The BigOven online recipe archive is an excellent resource, especially when you are looking for an obscure recipe.

The search function is user-friendly and you can search by keywords, rating, title and ingredients; however, you can't narrow your search by excluding ingredients. You can use the search function to keep track of what your family likes and doesn't like by strategically adding keywords to the program and tagging recipes accordingly.

A unit converter function will convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit and from Imperial to Metric measurements—useful for recipes that were developed outside of the United States or Britain. Post original or revised recipes to your own website or to BigOven.com with BigOven's web publishing tools, which convert your recipes to HTML format and provide webpage appearance templates. BigOven encourages users to share family recipes on the BigOven website because it increases the number of tried-and-tested recipes available to their customers.

BigOven's Web tab allows you to search over 150,000 recipes online. It provides multiple search options under five categories, including main ingredient, cuisine, preparation method, season/occasion, and course/dish. You can also search using your own keyword. Once you find the recipe you are looking for, you can easily download it into your collection.

Bonus Features

The cookbook and recipe software comes with 58 keywords organized by:

• • Course/Dish
• • Preparation Method
• • Season/Occasion
• • Special Considerations

Adding keywords is especially easy, and it makes searches more customized to your needs. You can note what your mother-in-law liked—and what she hated. You can even mark some keywords private so when you share a recipe only the public keywords appear.

Use Leftover Wizard to get ideas for turning your leftovers into another meal. Input up to three items and get easy recipes that use them.

Idea Wizard will generate recipes based on the ingredient you enter and can filter by special considerations such as kid-friendly and easy.

Take it on the road: BigOven provides an app that is iPad and iPhone compatible. Forget slips of paper—the grocery list is on your phone.

Ease of Installation:

We experienced no difficulties while installing BigOven Deluxe.

Help/Support:

BigOven Deluxe comes with a Getting Started Guide. The program itself is much easier to use than the guide indicates. A complete help document is included with the program, use the online FAQs page, Message Board, or you can submit a support request. We would like to see more prominant email and telephone support contact information posted on their support page.

Summary:

BigOven Deluxe Inspired Cooking is the only cookbook and recipe software to link to an online recipe archive that is constantly expanding. The program offers all the features to inventory your own collection and gives you access to recipes from thousands of home cooks. Printing options are limited, but if you're looking for recipes and meal management, this is the one. Here is a program for cooks, beginner to expert, complete with more search functions and recipes than any other software.

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