Five Easy Tips for Speeding Up Your Journal Entries

If you've been clicking the "New" button (above the meals journal) for each and every food entry, then you're doing it the hard way. The food selection window was actually designed to stay open, until you are finished adding all of the foods to your journal for a day (or for a particular session).

Here's how you should be recording your foods:

1. Click the Journal button along the left of the program window and go to the Meals/Snacks tab.
    
2. Click the New button above the list area.
    
3. Find the first food that you've eaten and click on it.
    
4. Enter the number of servings in the field to the left of the food item. You can also use the Serving Selector by clicking the "..." button.
    
5. Now click the green checkmark button to the left of the servings field. This food has just been added to your journal. If you're curious, just drag the window over a little bit and you'll see the new food item in your journal.
    
6. Find the next food that you want to record and then repeat steps 4 and 5.

When you're all done, click the "Close" button to return to the Journal.  You'll see that all of your food items have been recorded in one step.
 
 

Most people eat the same things frequently (especially when on a diet).  To make your life a little easier, Weight-By-Date Pro automatically keeps track of what you're eating.  So, as you record food entries into the Journal, Weight-By-Date Pro puts these items in the "Recent Foods" list.

After just a few days of recording meals, this will be a big time-saver. Recording foods in your journal is probably where you will be spending most of your time. This feature alone can take a 15 minute task and reduce it to 5 minutes, because:

• Once you've used Weight-By-Date Pro for a few days, you won't have to search the entire food database as often.
   
• Once you've used the program for a couple of weeks, you'll rarely have to search the food database.

How do you use the Recent Foods list? When you click the "New" button to make a new journal entry, click on the "Find Food by Group/List" tab (if it's not already selected). Then select "Recent Foods" from the "List" field right above the list of foods. You'll see every food that you've eaten for the last 14 days and you can insert them into your journal just as you normally would (see tip #1).
 
 

If you haven't discovered the Recipes feature of Weight-By-Date Pro, this is a good time to do it, because this is where you will be able to speed up your journal entries the most.

You probably think of a recipe in the classic sense: as ingredients and instructions for preparing a meal. Weight-By-Date Pro can do this for you easily with the Recipes feature. But it can do so much more, if you also think of a recipe as an entire meal, where the ingredients are actually individual foods in the meal.

How does this help you? This will not only speed up the process of recording foods, but it will make your journal easier to read.  By grouping food items in a recipe, you only have a single item to select for your journal (the recipe itself). This reduces several journal entries to one.

For example, let's say you like to have scrambled eggs for breakfast, along with some toast (with butter), and a glass of orange juice.  Just create a recipe called "Scrambled Eggs" and add each of these food items as ingredients of the recipe.  You've just created a meal and reduced at least four journal entries into one.

How do you create Recipes?  It's easy:

1. Go to your journal by clicking on the "Journal" button along the left side of the program window.
    
2. Click the "Edit Recipes" button which you'll see under "View/Edit My Recipes".
    
3. When the Recipe Setup window appears, click the New button at the top of the window. Then give the recipe a name and enter a 1 for the number of servings (since this is a meal).
    
4. Now click the "New" button above the "Ingredients/Foods Used" list and begin adding the foods to this meal. It's just like adding foods to your journal.

After you have a recipe created, it will go into your "My Recipes" list. When you're making a new journal entry, click on the "Find Food by Group/List" tab and select "My Recipes" from the "List" field. Then select your recipe as you would any other food item.
 
 

You might be tempted to look for a food by selecting its food group and scrolling through the list. With over 40,000 foods in the pre-loaded food database, this is definitely the hard way to do it. Consider doing a search instead.

How do you do a search?  Go to your journal and click New to create a new food entry. Then click on the "Find Food by Name Search" tab. Type part of the food's name and click the "Search Now" button. A full list of search results will quickly be displayed and you can insert them into your journal just as you normally would (see tip #1).

Here are some tips for searching for foods:

• For best results, search for the singular form of the word, as in "muffin" instead of "muffins".
   
• In some cases it's better to be less specific with your search. For example, if you're looking for "American cheese", try searching on just "american" or "cheese".
   
• If you're looking for a specific brand-name food, try searching on just the brand name. For example, you could search on "kraft" to see all of the Kraft products.
   
• If you're unsure of the spelling for something, then search for the part of the name that you can spell. As a simple example, if you search on "nut" you'll get all foods that have "nut" in their name. You'll get results for "peanuts", "walnuts", "beechnuts", etc.

You can see more search tips by clicking the "Search Tips" button next to the "Search Now" button.
 
 

Did you know that you can copy a range of food entries and paste them into another day of your journal? It's quite easy to do, actually. If you're not creating recipes as in tip #3, then you can consider this a nice alternative. It's also handy if you are using Weight-By-Date Pro for other family members who have eaten the same items.

Here's how to copy and paste a range of food entries:

1. Select the meals that you want to copy by clicking and dragging your mouse over the little gray square to the left of each food entry. When you do this, the rows that you have selected will be highlighted.
    
2. Now put your mouse over the selected rows, right-click, choose "Copy Rows", and then "Normal Copy".
    
3. Advance the journal to the date that you want to paste these food entries into. If you want to paste these foods into another profile, just select that person's profile from the "Profiles" menu and come back to the journal.
    
4. Right click anywhere in the area where the food entries are normally listed and choose "Paste Rows". You should see your new meals have been copied over to this day.

Another tip: Did you happen to notice the "For External Use" option when you right-clicked and chose Copy Rows? This means you can copy journal data and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet or word processing program.