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If you have a slow computer and want to hasten your startups and food searches, you can abridge Diet Power's dictionary to 3000 common foods. You can also suppress foods or recipes added to the dictionary by users of your copy of Diet Power, foods from chain restaurants, and dictionary entries that are actually name variants of the same food.
If you care more about selection than speed, however, you can load all 11,000 foods and their 10,000 name variants.
The tool for telling Diet Power which items to load is the Dictionary Abridger.
To open the Dictionary Abridger:
From your Home Screen:
1. Open the Food Menu (by clicking the word Food).
2. Click "Dictionary Abridger." A dialog will pop up, listing the different food sets and asking whether you want to include name variants.
To abridge or unabridge the dictionary¼
¼check the box beside each choice you want, and uncheck all the others.
Here are brief descriptions of the choices:
· Name variants are 10,000 duplicate entries meant to cover every possible wording that a user might search by. The main entry for hamburger, for example, is "Beef, ground"¾but if you load the name variants, you can also find it under "Ground beef" and "Hamburger." If your favorite search method is Incremental (see Dictionaries, Searching the), then loading the name variants will enable you to find nearly any food on your first try. If you don't use Incremental Search, however, you should uncheck the name variants: they nearly double Diet Power's startup time, and offer nothing that Keyword Search and Smart Search can't find.
· Common foods are the 3000 most popular generic items. Here's where you'll find bread and butter, coffee, tea, ground beef, spaghetti, hot dogs, orange juice, and such. All are listed in "military" style: the most basic noun followed by a string of increasingly specific modifiers separated by commas ("Beef, ground, extra-lean, pan-fried, well-done").
· Rare foods include regional and ethnic specialties, restaurant delicacies, and other items that most people have never tasted, as well as ordinary items prepared in unusual ways¾unsalted versions of normally salted foods, for example. This database has 5500 items, all listed in the military style described above.
· Chain-restaurant foods cover every item on the menus of 32 of the larget fast-food chains. They number about 2500.
· User-added foods are individual items that you or other members of your household have added to the dictionary yourself. Each user-added food is marked with the symbol .
· User-added recipes are combinations of items that you or others in your household have assembled under recipe names. (These also include a few starter recipes that have already been added by Diet Power.) All are marked with the symbol 
.
If only a few of your favorites are rare foods¼
¼and you don't want to load the entire rare-food database, here's a trick many dieters use:
1. Print the nutrient profile of each rare-food favorite.
2. Abridge the dictionary so it won't load the rare foods.
3. Put each favorite back into the dictionary by hand, using either Quick Food or the dictionary's Create-a-Food tab and copying the nutrient values from the printout.
This will make your rare favorites part of the user-added-foods set, which loads faster than the rare-foods set because it is smaller.
To leave the Dictionary Abridger:
If you want to save your work, click OK or press the Enter key. Diet Power will reassemble the dictionary according to your orders, then take you back to the Home Screen.
If you want to leave the dictionary as it was, click Cancel or press the Escape key. Before returning you to the Home Screen, Diet Power will restore the check boxes to the condition they were in when you opened the Abridger.