does anyone know if a software program exists that can help determine the point values for recipes?

i want to plug in the ingredients and the number of expected servings and have it pop out the points value!

i get so confused/frustrated doing all the math with my pencil, but i could just be cranky...

yes.

but still. anyone know of a magic points calculator?

isolde, good cook, not so great mathematician

Are you any good with Excel or any other spreadsheet program? This would be fairly simple to set up. Once you've got it set up once, you can use it again and again.

I'm visualizing a 4 column worksheet with say 10 or 20 rows for the name of your ingredient and the total calories/fat/fiber.

At the bottom I'd have a row that asks how many servings you want.

Then one more row that takes the total calories/fat/fiber and applies the WW points calculation to them (not sure that I'm allowed to post it here, but you should be able to find it on the web) and then divides the recipe's total points by the number of servings to get you Points Per Serving.

As long as you can find a web page or packaging for nutritional information on your ingredients, this would be a LOT easier than just adding it all up by hand.

i think my little arts and humanities brain just exploded.

they always told me math was important. i believed them, but it didn't make it one iota less treacherous.

i guess it's me and my pencil.

thanks for the suggestion, but i can't even get excel to average out my grade sheets

your useless math friend, isolde

there is also software called master cook that lets you put in your own recipes and it will calculate the nutritional value. Then you can easily figure the pts. the software is great for me as I find things I want to make i just put the reciepe in it calculates then I can change the number of serving, ingredients etc to I bought mine off ebay for 10.00

hope that helps...btw it also saves these recipes and has 1,000's for you to choose from

Please don't get too frustrated! This plan saved me from another ten years of hating shopping for myself. That's big. I just use a regular old calculator and pad and pencil. After the first month, most of the food I ate, I already had measured the food and points many times over. So my food diary just looks like:

one serving of Cheerios with skim 2.8
one serving of fat free Pringles 1.2
two cups of watermelon 1.5

and so on.

It gets really easy. I rarely eat out, which I am very proud about, but I have a list of some of the healthier options at fast food restaurants. Dottie's Weight Loss Zone has probably the best restaurant WW point list I have ever seen, not to mention best points list available online.

Living Cookbook will do this. http://www.livingcookbook.com

Configure Living Cookbook to calculate and display MyPoints

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. Under Nutrition, select MyPoints.
3. Enter values for the Calorie, Fat Grams, Fiber Grams and Saturated Fat Grams coefficients. Weight Watchers uses 50, 12, -5 and 0 respectively, but you could enter other values for other point systems. (Note In the United Kingdom Weight Watchers uses 0, 0, 70 and 4.)
4. Click OK. The MyPoints values will display at the bottom of nutrition tables for recipes, ingredients, menus and meals.

Note Weight Watchers is a registered trademark of Weight Watchers International, Inc. POINTS and 123 Success are trademarks of Weight Watchers International, Inc. Authentic information about the program is only available at your local Weight Watchers meeting. This application is not affiliated with Weight Watchers International in any way, and Weight Watchers has not reviewed this application for accuracy or suitability for Weight Watchers members.

By the way, there are also Demo Videos for Living Cookbook. I hadn't watched them until just now.

http://www.livingcookbook.com/product/movies.aspx

You might try this:
http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp
You input your recipe ingredient by ingredient and you then enter the number of servings. With one click, it'll punch out the nutritional info per serving for you. With this info, it'll be easy to figure out the points per serving with your points calculator.
This is the best that I could find, other than purchasing the WW online program with does have a recipe calculator that you can access...
Kira