Frequently Asked Questions About
Now You're Cooking! 
Shopping/Prices/Stores Troubleshooting
I need help with unit conversions to make quantities in shopping list and nutrition analysis work properly. Example: In recipes, adding 2 eggs gives me "cannot convert to grams" in nutritional analysis. Google search says there is approx 60 grams per egg. Okay, with 120 grams of eggs, nutrition analysis works great. However, in menu planning we are going to resize to 6 meals. This means 12 eggs. Shopping list says I need to purchase 0.72 kg eggs. In conversions for the ingredient: eggs, 1 gram = 0.01666667 egg. The way I think is 720 grams times 0.0166667 = 12 eggs. I would like to see 12 eggs in the shopping list. What am I doing wrong?
Use "mass-qualified" units for your recipe ingredients, to get what you want.
qty unit description
2 each (60 g) egg
Then the nutrition analysis will work because it recognizes the grams in the "mass-qualified" unit, and resized menu plans will generate a shopping list with qty as # of eggs.
I have created two menus ("menu1" & "menu2"), and I want both menus to be included on a single shopping list. My understanding is that this should occur automatically when I use the Append setting in the "When Saving Menu" radio group.
The Append radio button is only for appending items to the menu’s existing shopping list, not for merging two menus together. Append will add the shopping list items from the newly saved menu to the bottom of the menu’s pre-existing shopping list file (*.shp). To merge two shopping lists, open the first shopping list and use File... Merge Shopping List(s)... from the main menu when the shopping list window is open. This will let you select the second shopping list to be added to the open shopping list.
I don’t see any aisles listed in my shopping list by aisle, even though I know I have aisles in my price/aisle list. What’s up?
You have aisles in your price/aisle list for a store other than the store you are viewing the list by aisle for. In the shopping list by aisle window, select the other store (see droplist at upper left) and the list will refresh for the different store, and if that store has aisles listed in the price aisle list for the shopping list items, you will see those aisles in the list by aisle.
I created, saved, and named an empty menu plan but I see no shopping list associated with it.
If your meal plan has no entries for any meals, an associated shopping list is not created.
I enter a recipe with 1/4 liter skim milk, then put this recipe in a menu and view the shopping list. The shopping list show 250 milliliters skim milk! Why?
NYC by default has “Auto-Units” turned on, which will modify units to what it thinks are more reasonable. In its routine, it changes any qty of liters less than 0.5 into milliliters. We have adjusted this conversion in v5.61 and higher to not convert to milliliters until the liters qty drops to 0.1 instead of 0.5. For now, you can turn off the auto-units by unchecking “use best qty for units” in Tools… Options… Shopping tab.
My shopping list has double the items that it should, based on the recipes in my meal plan.
In your meal plan, click the meal window that contains the recipe that appears doubled, then press Resize and check to make sure you don’t have the recipe doubled in the meal plan. Also, make sure you don’t select “append” when you create or recreate a shopping list from a menu. Always use the “replace” button unless you really want to add your full menu again to the existing shopping list.
When I save a menu and NYC creates the shopping list, NYC sums the various ingredient quantities and seems to be working properly. I am trying to set up "custom conversions" for several items. I'll use butter here as an example. I want to convert sticks of butter to lbs. I have the following conversions set up (some I added directly, some were automatically created during the process).
butter lb 1 lbs
butter lb 4 stick
butter lb 4 sticks
butter stick 0.25 lbs
butter stick 1 sticks
But when I go to the shopping list and try and condense, I get 4 sticks of butter, not the expected 1 lb. Am I misunderstanding how the program is supposed to work?
Yes. NYC will combine "1 stick butter" and "1 lb butter" and replace with create "1.25 lb butter", because these butters have different units of measure. But if all butter items in your shopping list are in sticks, NYC simply adds them up and leaves the unit of measure as sticks. Thus, NYC will combine "2 sticks butter" with "3
sticks butter" and put "5 sticks butter" into the shopping list.
When I add a conversion factor to the Shopping… Conversions… list, sometimes I get a message about “x conversions added”, and sometimes I get “0 conversions added”, even though the conversion I entered seems to get added properly to the list. What is going on?
The message “x conversions added” refers to the number of additional conversions that NYC added automatically in addition to the one you added. As NYC adds your conversion, it compares it to other conversions on file, and when possible, NYC creates some new conversions using the one you entered. So there is no problem here. At the minimum NYC always adds the one you entered – even if it reads “0 conversions added”.
Why won't NYC open the last shopping list when I press the S button?
NYC features multiple menus and associated shopping lists, any of which could be the "last" shopping list used. When you save a menu, you create a shopping list which will then be remembered as the "last" shopping list until you access another one or you save a new menu. Until you save a menu or create a shopping list for the first time, you will not see a shopping list when you first use the S button.
The Help file says I should use File…Open Shopping List… to open an existing shopping list, but I cannot find that option on my screen.
Press the S toolbar button to open the latest shopping list. Then you will be able to see the File… Open Shopping List… selection.
I consistently get ‘Run-time Error 50003, Unexpected error’ when I open the shopping list or list cost window. It happens regardless of whether I use the toolbar or the menu to open the window. It then crashes the program. Why is this?
We have researched Error 50003 and find that it is a known bug in Microsoft VB5 (per Microsoft) that occurs with certain video cards when opening windows containing certain images. The problem has been fixed by Microsoft in VB6. We have switched to VB6 for NYC v5.33 and higher, so more recent versions should work properly for you.
I get "Run-time error 9: Subscript out of range” when I open a shopping list, Find Coupons, and click on Print after coupons are found. What is happening?
We have discovered that if your coupon strings include commas (e.g., “stuffing, stovetop”), you can have unpredictable problems because NYC does not appear to read these correctly. We are working on a solution, but for now, the workaround is to avoid use of commas in your coupon descriptions.
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Last Updated: 10/25/2022