Organise your recipes with Recipe Card-O-Matic

Recipe-Card-O-Matic is an editable PDF document that can be used to store your recipes. They can then be printed on blank, lined cards.

Installation is more complicated than most. Double-click on the downloaded file and a message will appear suggesting that you keep the PDF files in your My Documents folder. Click OK and the Winzip self extractor will appear. Click on the Browse button and find a folder for the files. Click on Unzip and the files will be copied on to your computer.

You will need Adobe Reader installed on your computer to access the cards. You can download it directly from the Adobe site with this link if you don't already have it.

The first page has the instructions of how to use the recipe file. This can be hidden once you get the idea of how it works.

Click on the edge of the recipe card to change the background and border. Double-click on the backgrounds folder to see the other backgrounds supplied with Card-o-matic. Select a new background and it will be applied to that recipe card. This means you can select different background for different recipes, which should help differentiate between different kinds of dish.

It is also possible to add a photo of the dish to the recipe card.

There are controls for moving recipe cards around within the PDF file so you can arrange recipes into categories to make them easier to find.

One small frustration is that because of the way that Adobe Reader X works, you cannot just click on save to update the file. Each time you click on save on a recipe card, the Save as dialogue will be displayed. You can still use the same name but it will warn you about overwriting the old version. This is only a minor problem.

It is possible to search the recipes with Adobe Reader.

This is a good tool for small recipe libraries but bigger ones will probably benefit from being based on something other than Adobe Reader.