Recipe Box Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
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- Why can't I enter my registration information?
- When entering ingredients The Recipe Box anticipates my entries incorrectly, how do I make the correct entries?
- How do I e-mail a recipe or several recipes to a friend who has The Recipe Box?
- How do I e-mail a recipe to a friend who doesn't have The Recipe Box?
- Why is it that sometimes e-mailed recipes can't be opened?
- Why are there numbers instead of ingredients in my recipes?
- What is the difference between a recipe book file and an export file?
Why can't I enter my registration information?
The OK button in the registration dialog box will only highlight when you have correctly entered your user name and registration key. Your user name and registration key were e-mailed to you when you purchased your license.
It is important to enter your registration information exactly as it appears in your registration e-mail. The user name and registration key are case-sensitive, so they must be capitalized in the same way shown in the e-mail.
Many Recipe Box users find it is easiest to copy the name and key from the e-mail and paste them into the registration window.
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When entering ingredients The Recipe Box anticipates my entries incorrectly, how do I make the correct entries?
Although The Recipe Box is very good at anticipating your entries once your ingredients, measures, and preparations dictionaries begin to grow, there are times when the suggestion that the application makes just isn't what you want.
You can easily suppress this behavior by typing an apostrophe (single quote) as the first character in the entry. For example, if you are trying to enter asparagus and you do not want any suggestions as you enter it, enter 'asparagus. The apostrophe will not be stored with your entry.
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How do I e-mail a recipe or several recipes to a friend who has The Recipe Box?
You can easily send one or more recipes to a friend who also uses The Recipe Box. To export the recipes you want to e-mail, select them in the main Recipe Box window. Choose Export... from the File menu and enter a name for the export file. The resulting file can then be attached to an e-mail message, but we recommend that it be compressed or zipped to avoid problems with text processing performed by some e-mail servers and software.
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How do I e-mail a recipe to a friend who doesn't have Recipe Box?
It's easy to copy the list of ingredients or an entire recipe and paste it into the body of an e-mail message. Although nicely formatted for printing, the resulting message cannot be directly imported into The Recipe Box.
To copy the ingredients or an entire recipe, open the desired recipe and choose Copy Special -> Copy Ingredients or Copy Special -> Copy Recipe from the Edit menu.
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Why is it that sometimes e-mailed recipes can't be opened?
Note that only exported recipes (.rbexport files) can be e-mailed, not recipe books (.rbbook files).
When you have difficulty opening an exported recipe file after it has been e-mailed, it is usually caused by the text formatting performed by e-mail servers and applications. Sometimes changing where the line breaks occur in the file can cause The Recipe Box to fail to open the file successfully.
To ensure that the file is e-mailed successfully, we recommend compressing or zipping the file before e-mailing it.
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Why are there numbers instead of ingredients in my recipes?
This can happen if you try to import (File menu, Import...) a recipe book (.rbbook) rather than a previously exported file (.rbexport).
In later versions of The Recipe Box the file format for both recipe books and export files has been modified to prevent inadvertent importing of recipe books.
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What is the difference between a recipe book file and an export file?
With current versions of The Recipe Box, the only difference is that exporting allows you to include only some of the recipes from your recipe book rather than all of them.
Versions of The Recipe Box prior to 1.0 stored export files and recipe books differently. The main difference was that a recipe book stored each recipe with references into your personal ingredient, measurements, and preparations dictionaries while an exported file contained the fully-elaborated recipes.
Recipe books were smaller and maintained consistency between recipes by referring to your dictionaries. The copy of The Recipe Box on another computer may not have all of the same ingredients or may have them in different locations within the dictionaries, so exported files could not rely on the dictionary references.
Once an exported file was imported, the resulting recipes once again contained dictionary references appropriate for the dictionaries on that computer.
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