Now You're Cooking! Tip - July-August 2010

July-August 2010

Merge and Delete Categories Across Cookbooks

Many NYC users like to keep consistent category wording across cookbooks. This is a good practice if you import/export between cookbooks, or you search within a category across cookbooks (in other words, you limit a recipe search across cookbooks to only consider a particular category). NYC 5.87 and higher have a powerful feature to manage (merge and delete) categories across cookbooks.

To open the manage categories feature, select Tools… Data Management… Categories… Manage Categories button.

A list of categories will appear that contains all the categories in all cookbooks found in the folder with your current cookbook (normally this is your user folder). As you inspect the category list, you might see redundant entries such as “vegetables”, “vegetarian”, and “vegetable dishes”. This means the “vegetables” category is not labeled consistently across your cookbooks. This can occur if you transfer categories during recipe import/export, or if you add categories across cookbooks without using consistent wording.

To merge these three categories across cookbooks, multi-select all three categories.

Make sure the category name you want to use for these three categories appears in the “category to map to” textbox (edit the word there as necessary). For example, edit the word to appear as “vegetables”.

If you want to delete the “vegetarian” and “vegetable dishes” categories immediately after the merge operation (you probably do), click the checkbox “delete old categories after mapping” above the textbox.

Press the “Map Selected Categories to Above Category” button. NYC will display a window that explains what categories will be affected with a Yes/No prompt. Confirm by pressing the Yes button. The operation will proceed.

You have now re-categorized all recipes that used to be in the “vegetarian” and “vegetable dishes” categories into the “vegetables” category, and you have deleted the now-empty “vegetarian” and “vegetable dishes” categories.

Note that you could have named the target category as “veggies”, in which a new category would have been created in the cookbooks where any one of the other three categories (“vegetarian”, “vegetable dishes”, “vegetables”) was merged into the new “veggies” category.

Note also that no recipes are deleted when mapping or deleting categories - only the categorization is changed.

Back to Now You're Cooking! Recipe Software