Balance

Review by Gretchen Becker

SUMMARY

I really, really like this program. It has so much to offer I don't see how it can be beat.

It includes nutrition with data on up to 11 nutrients, graphing with a lot of customizable options, nice printout of graphs, good documentation, educational material, and a very, very intuitive interface for anyone accustomed to working with Windows.

The only flaws from my point of view are a lack of the 15 Event codes in the Profile meter, inability to do a line graph for more than one day at a time, and some problems with the drug analysis graphs.

Also, the company seems to have gone out of business, so no help is available.

PRO
There are some things that computers do really well. One of these is the ability to recalculate a result if you change one of the variables, something that would be tedious by hand. The health interview that begins the Balance program takes advantage of this computer ability and is almost worth the price of the program alone.

After you honestly enter your own health parameters, you see what your heart attack risk is, and then you can change some of the parameters on one screen and see how the changes would affect your risks.

Having DM increases the risk of people my age from 7 to 14%. But some factors like cholesterol, smoking, and BP we can change, and it's fascinating to see which are the most important ones for your own situation.

It's easy to navigate, with buttons on top and sides of screen that are always visible so you can easily jump to another area. There are also "Back" arrows that are very intuitive for anyone accustomed to navigating the Net. No looking for "Done" buttons or using the "Esc" key.

Supports 8 users. The manual is professionally done and easy to follow (makes one appreciate professional writers and editors as opposed to those who think anyone can write a manual and print it with DTP).

I really like this program and find it easy to use. There are so many useful features I can't list them all. But you can enter dates from a calendar, instead of having to type in values. Everything seems to be handy when you need it, and you can always jump to Home if you get lost. You can display the 4 most important nutrients beside each meal and as you add foods you can see how close to your limits you're getting. You can choose which 6 nutrients to show in the overall Food List (Diabetes Partner shows only 4, with no choice about which 4. I assume nutrition programs show more.)

When you choose a food you can add it to a sublist of My Foods so you can easily find the foods you eat the most often. Balance has Favorite Meals and also Recipes. If your recipe serves 12, you can use one serving and get 1/12th of the nutrients.

When you choose a food, there is a multitude of units you can use to choose portion sizes. This is wonderful, as you can use teaspoons, grams, ounces or whatever. HealthView lacked this versatility; you had to use a fraction of the standard serving size.

The graphs show not only the amounts of various nutrients in either bar or line graph form, but there's an "audit" feature that shows you which 5 foods you ate were highest in the selected nutrient (choice of 11 plus calories). So if you think you're getting too much fat, you can see which were the fattiest foods you ate that day, that week, that month, that quarter, or that year!

The search for foods is fast, about 3 seconds. You can add foods not on the list.

You can show a graph of a day's readings, by time of day or you can show all the fastings, all the postmeal, etc. by week or month or year, and you can compare one graph with another on the same screen. The ability to show all the fastings, all the prelunch, all the predinner, etc., is what I was looking for last fall but couldn't find in any program and ended up graphing by hand. Unfortunately, those readings are now gone from my meter. And since it doesn't use the 15 codes I'm not sure it would sort appropriately.

Docs tell you which files need to be backed up. Very useful.

Very intuitive. Wanted to select several events and the Shift and Ctrl keys worked the same as they do in Explorer, even though this wasn't in the documentation. I often click the right mouse button and get what I thought I might find.

PRO and CON
There are some things computers don't do that well, and one of them is written material. I prefer to read a book. It's more comfortable to sit in a comfortable chair, and I find I can skim much faster with a book than on a screen, except in the rare instances when I need a search facility. With a book you can start at the beginning and read to the end and you know you've covered all the material. When you skip around, as with a computer Online Help feature, you don't know how much of the total you've read. So, the Health References provided by this program might be a useful feature for the person who wasn't going to spend the money to buy relevant books, but I don't find them a plus. I'd rather have the room on my HD. I can't remember if you have a choice of installing them or not. I suppose I can always just delete the files form my HD.

Balance does let you add unlimited numbers of meals. But if you add too many a lot of the information becomes hidden because there's no room on the screen. If you increase the resolution of the screen, the situation is improved as Balance automatically expands to fill the screen, however.

Each meal shows the time and four selected nutrients, but even with 3 meals and 2 snacks, some of the nutrients don't show. Add more snacks and some of the meals don't show with my low-res screen.

I didn't like the daily graph printout because the lines connect only similar events, which made an odd look when I was doing a long PP curve. However, by doing a Modal Day plot for one day only and connecting the dots my self, I got a good-looking graph.

CON
It conflicts with First Aid.

On the list report, the events are labeled according to how the program sorted them and not according to the actual labels in the meter. This is one place in which the InTouch progam was better, and one major flaw of this program. When I do a test of a new substance, I use the "other" label, and I'd like to be able to separate out these readings when I'm looking at my average fastings or preprandials. This program doesn't have the 15 event codes of the Profile, so although you can manually change the codes (and "other" is one of these), you can't use all the codes the Profile allows such as pre-exercise etc. This is an area the program could use an update for.

Balance doesn't do exchanges. In fact anyone wanting help planning high-carb (ADA) meals with exchanges might prefer HealthView.

One thing you can't show in a graph, I don't think, is the daily readings by time of day for more than one day. In the weekly, monthly, etc. graphs they put all the day's readings at one point, like a modal day graph. This is something that could be improved.

I don't understand the Drug analysis graph. When testing I erroneously put Benzegal into an Event on the calendar. I later deleted it as an Event, but it remains in the title of the Drug graph and I don't see how I can get rid of it. The graph lets you select "all drugs" or each drug individually. When I select "all drugs" there are entries for the days in which I took Lipitor. When I select Lipitor or any of the other drugs offered, nothing is displayed. This is not a graph I'd use much, but it suggests problems. The documentation about this drug graph is minimal.

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David Mendosa
4455 Chippewa Drive
Boulder, Colorado 80303
E-mail: mendosa@mendosa.com