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There is no doubt that paper is something useful, easy to use and much taken for granted. One of the biggest problems with it, though, is storing it. Many of us have important documents stuffed haphazardly in drawers, scraps of paper littering our desks and a quivering mountain of foolscap towering overhead.
What can you do about it? ScanSoft promises that the new version of its PaperPort software will sort out your problems.
PaperPort is now on version 8, which illustrates that it has been around for a good long while. It is designed for use in conjunction with your scanner and PC to make digital copies of your paper documents, leaving you free to store your paperwork out of the way while keeping copies easily accessible. It's a lovely idea.
Finding the right words
If PaperPort simply scanned in documents and that was that, it would be a pretty hopeless product as any basic art package will let you scan a document to make a copy. What makes it worthwhile is the fact it scans each document to take note of the words in it.
All the words scanned are stored in a big database, so when you need to find a particular document, you can bash a keyword into the search tool and it will pull up a list of all your scanned documents that contain the word.
If you only have a few documents, it's not that useful, but if you scan in all your important paperwork it can be a major time as well as a space saver.
Easy OCR
In order to find the words that occur in the documents, a simple form of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is employed. Traditionally, OCR software is designed to turn paper documents into editable digital ones. You can do that with PaperPort but there are better options for simple OCR. It also allows web pages to be scanned and stored in the same way.
OCR software is a tricky customer to get right and the OCR performance of PaperPort was below par. Even relatively simple documents required correcting to accurately mirror the paper versions, and tables of figures fared little better. That said, it's a far quicker process than entering the data by hand.
Scribbles and straightening
One nice feature of PaperPort is that you can tidy up a scanned document before putting it through the OCR process. For instance, any scribbles can be erased and the page can be straightened before storage.
Also, if some important information needs to be added to the document, annotations and corrections can be added without any permanent changes being made to the scan.
When the documents are being browsed after saving, thumbnail images appear so telling articles, tables and images apart is simple without opening each file. You can then click and drag a file to a folder for saving, or open it in an application by dragging it to an appropriate icon.
Following form
PaperPort comes with a few additional features, such as the impressive FormTyper, which allows you to scan forms that need to be filled out. PaperPort finds the fields that need to be filled in and makes adding information a breeze before printing.
The free one-year subscription to PaperPortOnline is of little use for most; it allows a document to be stored and edited by multiple users.
At £60, Paperport Deluxe 8 is fairly priced. It places hefty demands on PCs though, so bank on needing a 450MHz computer to get good results. If you have a mountain of paper to wade through, it's worth a look.
Contact
ScanSoft 0118 966 8421 www.scansoft.co.uk
ALSO CONSIDER
Scansoft Omnipage Pro 11
An excellent dedicated OCR package
£435 (£100 if upgrading an OCR package from any manufacturer)
****
Computeractive, Issue 92
See also:
Low-cost OCR software that converts printed pages into editable text and graphics files. 29 Aug 2002
All Office Applications
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