] The food log shows your daily food intake broken down and
] subtotaled by meal.
]
] * Simple direct spreadsheet entry
] * Searches as you type
] * Full undo and redo
] * Make new foods from marked lines
] * View daily calorie breakdown and carb-prot-fat percentages

I've been reviewing various calorie-counting programs lately. Most of them are pretty pathetic. Small or nonexistent databases, tedious and difficult to use interfaces, etc.

This one, DietOrganizer by MulberrySoft, isn't perfect, but is the best I've found so far, and I may well buy it when my free trial runs out. It's extremely easy to use.

For example, when I'm entering in the list of everything I eat over the course of a day, I just type in a few letters of whatever I want, and it automatically suggests what it thinks I'm trying to type **even if the letters aren't consecutive**. And then it gets even better -- if I didn't have a full portion of something, like I ate a quarter of an apple, 2.5 strips of bacon, or drank 1/3 of a cup of orange juice, I can just enter in my best guess of the quantity, and it'll automatically calculate the correct relative percentages of calories, protein, carbs, etc., based on the other values that have been entered for "full" servings. And any items that it doesn't already have in its database, can easily be added, along with completely customizable "portions" suggestions. Like I've been entering in my favorite types of sushi, and I can set it to suggest portion sizes of "roll" "ounce", "piece", "serving", or anything else I want.

It also displays a very easy to understand color-coded bar chart that instantly shows the relative percentages of fat/protein/carbohydrates on each item, as well as how my total day's intake is looking, or it'll chart out the last week, or any other range I want.

Where it still needs improvement, is in the category of tracking exercise levels (it has a few basic categories, but I'd like to see something with more detail). On the plus side though, it does factor in what it can. For example, if I spend 30 minutes on an exercise bike, the software correctly calculates probable calories burned, and can factor it in to my daily total to see how my day is balancing.

Another area where the software gets confused has to do with combining foods. It does have excellent copy/paste functionality, and I can shift-click to select multiple different individual foods and then easily combine them into a single menu item (which is *very* handy for frequently-eaten sandwiches), but parts of the charting system break when I do this -- For example, it can easily tell the food groups of bread, tunafish, and mayo if they're entered individually, but when I combine them into a sandwich, it just shows up as "undefined" on the daily food group chart.

Overall though, the rest of the interface and functionality is head and shoulders above everything else I've looked at.

- Elonka

DietOrganizer - Diet software for calorie counting and weight loss