Review: PaperPort Deluxe 8.0
Swap those important papers into manageable digital documents, writes Dave Cook.
| Product | PaperPort Deluxe 8.0 |
|---|---|
| Company | Scansoft |
| Web | uk.scansoft.com |
| Price | £59 |
| We like | Powerful, versatile, yet easy to use |
| We don't like | Basic OCR facilities |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
For years, large companies, SOHO users, and yes, even computer magazines have been dreaming of the paperless office. It's certainly a nice idea, but the paperless office is not entirely without drawback. For one thing, you need patience by the bucket-load as you transform those reams of papers into digital documents, plus a paper management utility such as ScanSoft's PaperPort Deluxe 8.0.
PaperPort is an easy-to-use electronic filing cabinet program that supports a wide range of scanners, digital cameras, and networked digital copiers. First you convert your paper documents or photos into images via scanner, for instance. Thereafter, PaperPort enables you to store, search, organise, retrieve, and print those previously paperbound documents right alongside their PC equivalents.
ScanSoft claim that PaperPort Deluxe 8.0 has been designed to work with new releases of AOL, Windows XP, Office XP, Quicken, and more. Thus, you can work with Word files, spreadsheets, photos, and PDF files; indeed, virtually any document in file format. Moreover, having scanned everything to computer, you can place your paper documents in storage, well out of harm's way.
New Features
PaperPort may have been around for some time, but it doesn't look long in the tooth, far from it. New features include support for standard file formats like JPEG and TIFF when working with scanned documents and photo images. There's also a new explorer-like Details view, which lets you quickly peruse a folder of files by, for example, name, date, and size.
PaperPort can also be used with a new Web-based document store, called PaperPort Online. The service is aimed at businesses that need to edit, share, and distribute digital documents, as well as communicate with colleagues and customers who don't have access to PaperPort. One year's free subscription is included, but after that the service will set you back around $60 per annum.
Easy To Use
As ever, the use of thumbnails makes visually managing your documents a doddle. Expansion is no problem either, as you can quickly add new folders to the Explorer-like interface.
You can stack scanned images just as you would with paper documents. Annotation tools let you add notes to the top of scanned images, while colour-coded folders help improve efficiency still further. The image cleanup tools are also useful, as they enable you to correct and heal images as well as crop, straighten, and rotate.
Meanwhile, the familiar toolbar at the bottom of the screen offers a number of pre-configured application icons, or you can add your own. Dragging a document from a PaperPort folder to an icon sends it to that particular application. For example, you can drag and drop a scanned document to your favourite word processing software, which then turns the document into editable text. No prior expertise is necessary, as PaperPort handles any necessary conversions automatically.
There's an improved optical character recognition (OCR) engine, although OCR facilities are still a tad basic. However, that's not particularly important because PaperPort is capable of creating document images without necessarily going through the process of OCR.
The SimpleSearch facility is useful, and uses a combination of OCR and full-text indexing to help you find specific documents. As with other indexing utilities, you can configure indexing to be updated automatically when you add new documents, or have it wait until your computer is idle. This latter option is best for computers installed with only small amounts of RAM.
Verdict
PaperPort Deluxe 8.0 is an extremely versatile paper management solution. OCR limitations are barely noticeable, it's easy to use, and overall it's a superb all-rounder.
