Excel Recipe Manager/Shopping List Creator

I came across this fun and free Excel tool for meal planning. It's an Excel spreadsheet that allows you to list your recipes along with the ingredients you usually have to buy to make them. Once you have the recipes entered you can click a button to have it give you a random 5 recipes to make for the coming week. You can pick from those or click again to get more choices.

Once you've selected which recipes you want for the week, simply click the Shopping List tab where you will find a shopping list already generated and ready for printing. Pretty cool!

The tool is called Cathy's Recipe Manager and you can find it here at Juice Analytics, a web page about Excel. The article is called "Instant Shopping Lists, or... How Excel Can Improve Your Marriage."

When I first looked at it I was concerned because the dropdowns did not have the recipes in alpha order so it was a little difficult to find the one you wanted. But then I figured out that I could sort the Recipe Main sheet by recipe and voila - alphabetized dropdowns.

If you have Excel and want to try this out I encourage you to do so. It's super easy to use. And I'll answer any questions if you get stuck with it.

Happy meal planning!

Picasa Software for Pictures

Sometime I want to try out Picasa which is available free from Google. What interests me most about this software is 1. the ability to add captions which will be saved with my pictures; and 2. supposedly super easy photo editing capabilities.

While reading reviews I found a negative comment that indicated you cannot change the dates associated with a picture. They have made a fair number of changes in this product since those reviews were writtenso maybe that is no longer the case. Something to test.