1. Auto-fill is not Working
2. Pam's Illustrated Import Assistant Instructions

1. Auto-fill is not Working

Q: I copied recipes from an internet site into a MSPublisher document. The Import Assistant will take most of these recipes if I "Move to Recipe" the different sections, including Ingredients. Auto-fill only adds the Title even when Title, Ingredients, & Directions are highlighted. A few of these recipes are accepted by auto-fill, though. What is wrong?

A: I think the problem is that you are going from an MS Publisher document to MasterCook's IA. I just copied a recipe from the internet and pasted it into a Publisher document, which I then saved as a Publisher document with the .pub extension. Then I copied the recipe from the pub document into IA -- everything in the recipe went into the title, even though I had separated the different sections of the recipe by totally blank lines in the IA window.

When I copied the same recipe directly from the internet site (I used foodtv.com) into IA, the recipe went in properly.

Then, I copied the Publisher recipe text into Notepad. There were odd characters in the ingredient section that Notepad did not know what to do with, so it rendered them as boxes on the screen. So there are some sort of extra characters in there. Even when I backspaced in IA to delete trailing spaces in the ingredient line (or what showed as trailing spaces), IA still had trouble with the recipe. It looks in Notepad like the odd character is not at the end of the ingredient line, but at the beginning of a new ingredient line instead. And IA is not translating whatever it is into a space or box you can see on screen.

I save my internet recipes into Notepad plain text files because I am sure that extra formatting will not be preserved. I suggest that you try copying your Publisher-saved recipes into Notepad, and cleaning them up, then using IA to import them. See if that won't work better.

NOTES: The recipe should be in this format below in the Import Assistant if you are going to be using the Auto-Fill button:

Recipe Title
<insert a blank line here>
list of ingredients
<insert a blank line here>
directions follow You could also have your recipe in this format as well: Recipe Title
<insert a blank line here>
Recipe Notes (these will auto-fill to the notes section)
<insert a blank line here>
list of ingredients
<insert a blank line here>
directions follow

I make sure there are no hidden characters between the recipe sections by putting my cursor in front of the first ingredient and then using the Backspace key up to the end of the recipe title and then use the Enter key. This way I know there is a true blank line inserted between the recipe title and ingredients. I do the same thing in between the ingredients and directions as well as between the recipe title and the notes.

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2. Pam's Illustrated Import Assistant Instructions

Visit this web page for illustrated Import Assistant instructions.

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