Do you save reloading recipes from gun magazines like Shooting Times and Gun World?

Do you save reloading recipes from gun magazines like Shooting Times and Gun World? How do you keep up with them? Do you have old recipes from old magazines that you can actually find? How do you do it? Do you tear out the page with the recipe? Do you write the page number on the front of the magazine and keep the whole magazine? How do you organize it so that you can actually find a recipe that you are hunting for?

I am trying to do this and would love to hear how others do it or think it might be done.

Back when I read gun rags, I copied the loads down into a notebook. Nowadays, I would use an Excel spreadsheet.

I actually thought about get one of those index thingies to use for this, something like this.

http://www.amazon.com/Rolodex-67197-Business-100-Card-Capacity/dp/B00006IBSN/ref=sr_1_9?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1343395511&sr=1-9

nicholst55 wrote:Back when I read gun rags, I copied the loads down into a notebook. Nowadays, I would use an Excel spreadsheet.

How much do you copy? How much info do you try to save? Here is a table from page 20 of January 2010 Guns magazine.

Would you try to copy the entire table?
The reason I ask is I think I would like to save the entire table but it seems like a lot of trouble. And I don't know how to organize the info to where I could find it later.

How much do you copy? How much info do you try to save?

That will depend on how much info you want to keep and keep organized. You can keep all of it in case you ever want it or just the portion that directly relates to what you are loading. Putting it into a spreadsheet would be an easy way to organize- as you can have one workbook for each caliber and then a tab in that workbook for each bullet mfg.
I don't save the info from the mags but will go out to the Hodgen site and find something in the caliber that I am working with. I copy the contents into a word document and save it to a folder with the caliber name. I use an access database to keep up with loads that I work up and the results.

I used to have a 3-ring binder full of load data from various sources. Now I have a folder on my hard drive.

nicholst55 wrote:I have a folder on my hard drive.

How do you get the data to the hard drive? Do you copy it by hand? Or scan it in with an OCR (optical character recognition) program? Or take a photo of it with your digital camera and then copy the graphic to your hard drive folder? The reason I ask is that I worry about getting typos (copying it wrong).

Here is what I have now. I write the caliber of the recipe on the front of the magazine and also the page number where the recipe is. Here is a photo showing this:


and then I put the magazine in a magazine holder that is labeled for that caliber. Here is what the shelf looks like:


But if a magazine has a recipe for more than one caliber that I load for then the system does not work.

Anybody else tried this method or have any thoughts on it?

I would think that system would take up a great deal of room - room that I don't have. I either type the info in as I look at the magazine, or else copy it down and then type it in later. The possibility of typos is very real; recently I've taken to cross-referencing anything I've copied down with at least one other source to check for typos. Not 100% effective, because even the reloading manuals publish typos from time to time, but 100% better than nothing!

NO I start out with a load book. I work up to a load that is 1/2 inch or less.