To open the group & recipe manager from the main diary locate the dedicated group toolbar located below your main diary.

The toolbar has three options, ‘Group’, ‘Create’ and ‘Insert’

The ‘Create’ option will look at the items you currently have selected in your diary. If you have two or more items selected, it will ask you for a name for your new group, and add the items to the new group automatically. If you a single item selected the ‘create’ option will ask you for a name for your group and create an empty group for you. Once your group has been created you will be taken to the recipe manager screen so you can edit the group, add or remove items etc.

The ‘Insert’ option is used to load the group and recipe manager so you can insert a group into your diary.

The ‘Group’ option is the smart option, it will look to see if you have anything selected in your diary, if you do it will select the ‘create’ option for you, if you do not it will select the ‘insert option’.

You can also load the group & recipe manager by clicking the ‘edit’ menu in the menu bar and selecting ‘Add food from a group’.

The group & recipe manage will be shown when you click on the ‘insert’ button in the group toolbar, or immediately after creating a new group.

(1) The first box will list all your groups, in the example we just have a single group ‘Ham Sandwich’.
(2) Immediately below you will see a list of the items in the selected group, and the quantity of each item.

Along the top of the manager window you will see a tab bar.

This bar lets you quickly jump to groups or recipes starting with the appropriate letter, or perform a search.

The buttons to the right of the list of your groups are fairly self explanatory.

Clicking ‘new’ will create a new group, ‘rename’ lets you rename a group title and ‘remove’ lets you delete a group. The ‘help’ button opens a small reminder window to show you these options within the application.

To edit items within a group, simply click the appropriate icon.

(1) Click on the ‘+’ icon to the left of ‘item’ to add a new item to the group.
(2) Selecting the arrow icon lets you change the quantity of the item within the group
(3) Selecting the ‘x’ icon lets you delete an item from the group.

To add the group to your diary you will want to specify the portion size, and the meal you would like to add the group to.

The portion size is simply the size of the serving, or portion. If you would like to insert one of everything in the group, simply enter 1. If however you have created a recipe for a pie, and eaten 1/3rd of the pie you can enter 1/3, or 0.3. You can also enter multiple numbers, for example if you create a group ‘coffee with milk and sugar’, you can enter 2 or 3 to add 2 or 3 servings to your diary.

To select the meal simply click on the meal box to list the meal titles.

Once you have selected your portion size and meal name, click ‘Add to diary’ to add the items to your diary.

If you have multiple users set up on the computer, the software will display an additional ‘Share’ button.

This button lets you share any groups of recipes you create with other users so they can add the same group easily. Simply select a group or recipe and then click the ‘Share’ button to copy the group to another user.

* Feature added in version 3.2.2, November 2009.

To the right of your group you will see a breakdown of the nutritional profile for the group.

This can help you reach a target nutritional profile as you can vary the ingredients or members of your group to achieve the profile you are aiming for.

* Feature added in version 3.2.3, November 2009