Now You're Cooking! Tip - September 2005

September 2005

Importing Mastercook Recipes

There is confusion among some NYC users about how to import Mastercook recipes arising from the various file extensions used by Mastercook. This tip should help clarify. NYC can only import Mastercook’s export text format. Export text formats include “.mxp” and “.mx2” file extensions. The “.mxp” format (Mastercook’s earlier export text format) can be easily imported into NYC, and it is the preferred Mastercook format for importing Mastercook recipes into NYC. Sometimes the “.mx2” format can be imported, but this format includes numerous HTML tags that may cause it to fail for one reason or another. If you wish to port your Mastercook recipes over to NYC, it is highly recommended that you export them from Mastercook using the “.mxp” format, then import the “.mxp” file into NYC. One NYC user has told us that you can also export from Mastercook 5+ in plain text format, and these recipes are reasonably importable into NYC (this MC format does not truncate the ingredients field at 32 characters apparently). NYC’s import routines continue to be improved over time, so future guidelines may be more relaxed.

Actual Mastercook cookbooks (not exported text files) have a file extension like “.mcf” or “.mc2”. These are in NOT importable by NYC, because these are in Mastercook’s proprietary binary format. Mastercook proprietary formats are unavailable to us, just as NYC’s cookbook format (“.gcf”) is our proprietary binary format and thereby unavailable to other software developers.

Back to Now You're Cooking! Recipe Software