ProChef Plus for Windows

User Reviews

• A good product for the price

  TapTapperApril 17, 2005

  Pros

  Highly recommended for small/medium food producers who need an easy way to scale recipes and track costs and inventory. I run a small baking business and really needed to consolidate my information without paying $500 for software. I’ve downloaded quite a few recipe management programs and ProChef Plus is the one I like the best. It’s a generally friendly program, easy to figure out and quite stable. The interface is intuitive with most features easily found. MUCH better than iPro or Easy Recipe Deluxe. Other programs either have too many buttons (sometimes 20 or more toolbar buttons), confusing menus, or stacks of modal popup windows. <p>The costing feature is handy, right there when you are viewing the recipe, and is well integrated with the recipe ingredients list. I’ve used all of the features for several days and it hasn’t crashed once. iPro (which costs 3 times as much) froze and crashed all the time and required a walk-through tutorial to just enter a single recipe. It didn’t even recognize “Cups”!! With ProChef you can open it and get right to work. I’d entered ingredients, prices, suppliers, and several recipes before I ever needed to look at Help.

  Cons

  The company website is rather bare-bones. No Support area, FAQs or user forum. Any of those would save them (and us) a lot of time. The documentation and help system is quite sparse: if you didn’t figure it out looking at the dialog box, going to the Help system won’t get you any farther. The lack of sorting is another problem. I want to sort ingredients by category (strangely called “ID”), or by item price. Although the control looks like a standard multi-column listbox they did not enable the sort property. A user should be able to sort a list by ANY column, not just the pre-selected one. What if I wanted to know the item with the highest unit price? Or how many “Dairy” items I’ve entered? The “Convert US Measures to US Weights” is so far off as to be dangerous. For instance, most vol/wt tables in cookbooks will list unsifted bread flour as 4 cups to the pound. The ProChef converter changes 3 cups to 1.5 pounds! Pretty scary. The results textbox in the “Kitchen Converter” (US to Metric) is black, so the text never shows. I thought that might have been a result of using the free version, but even after purchase, registration and reboot it is still blank. Now I have to wait for them to answer my email.

  Summary

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