Customer Reviews

PaperPort Professional V12.0

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

How can you rate a program you don't have and apparently have no intention of buying? While their comments reflect my experience with Nuance (Not Much) Support, they were not a review of this software.

Unlike the first two "reviewers" I actually purchased and installed PP12 Pro.

My original title for this post was going to be, "A Giant Step Backwards." In my review of PP11 Pro I summed up by saying I hoped Ver 12 would be better. It isn't.

The first thing you will notice is the new tabbed ribbon interface. Unlike MS and others who have adopted this interface, this one is not too bad. The desktop is nice looking, too. These are about the only things good I have to say about the improvements to the program.

By default, PP saves documents in pdf format, as it has since at least V.9.

First problem: the new PDF Viewer Plus. This is the default viewer when you view a document in PP. Though the "About" screen says copyright 1995-2009 this seems very much like V.1.0 software, as it is very buggy. It, BTW, still uses the old style interface.

Nuance says, "A more extensive annotation set includes notes, text boxes, highlights, straight lines and free-form lines, making it easy to add comments to documents." Well, that's partially true. Most of the annotations were available in previous versions..and they worked.

Most annotations seem to work o.k, such as lines, stamp, sticky notes, etc. The "select text" toolbar button doesn't do anything unless you chose "Select Text" first from the drop-down menu. Then the button will sometimes work. The "Crop" button doesn't work and there is no "crop" choice from the drop-down. There is also a bug that causes the program to close if you chose "text box" from either the drop-down or the button.

O.K. You can change default to "ImageView within PP." Now you have all the features you love in PP...and they work still...mostly. The "Stamp" button says "Prompt for File" when clicked on, but does nothing, and all options on the "Configure" section of the tab remain greyed out.

Nuance claims, "PaperPort Professional 12 delivers a 42% increase in accuracy over the previous version. It even allows you to apply language settings to OCR for improved accuracy in all supported languages." Apparently English is not one of those languages.

The OCR is not improved since 11.2. (I'm not sure why they changed it between 11.0 and 11.2 but that's a whole other rant.) It still does not OCR properly to Excel. Instead of putting Col A in Col A, Col B in Col B, etc, it still insists in putting them all in Col A. Read my review of Ver. 11 Pro for the gory details. It still does not OCR accurately when it is a pdf document.

Over all, IMO, the "improvements" to PaperPort 12 aren't. The pretty new face is nice, but that's not enough of a reason to get the program. PDF Viewer Plus is too buggy to use, especially when there are other more stable programs out there. The OCR engine is still a bust. Save your $99 or $149 (depending on which "Upgrade" option you choose) or your $163.99 and up for the non-upgrade version.

Tho I have a support ticket into Nuance I don't expect much. I availed myself to the 30 day money back guarantee and reverted back to PP11.0, bugs and all.

UPDATE 10/16/09: I (finally) received the following reply to my OCR problem with PP 12:
>>>
Thank you for contacting Nuance Technical Support.

This is regarding the issue that you were encountering with PaperPort.

Sorry for the late reply.

Unfortunately it is a limitation of PaperPort 12 to perform an OCR with no borders or column file when sending it to Excel. We also recreated your issue here on our lab pc and we are also have the same output. But if you do have Omnipage it will help your PaperPort to perform more accurately in OCR-ing your file.
<<<

So it seems one of their "improvements" really did screw up something that used to work fine.

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EDIT 1 YEAR LATER (9/6/10) REVIEW OF PP 12.1
---------------------------------------------

I got a call from the sales team from Nuance trying to sell me stuff. After they talked me into PDFCreate they offered me a "deal" on PP 12.1. (About half of what I paid for the original upgrade from V 11.) Don commented to this review saying 12.1 fixed most of the bugs in 12.0 that I complained about. Since V 12.1 came with the 30 day money back guarantee I took the deal.

SINCE I WAS SO VOCAL IN MY REVIEW OF V.12.0 I FEEL IT IS ONLY FAIR TO POST A FOLLOW-UP REVIEW OF V.12.1.

As Don said in his comment to this review, most of the bugs of 12.0 HAVE been squashed in 12.1. Most of the ones I complained about, it turns out, were related to the PDF Viewer Plus module included in the program. This a stripped down version of PDFCreate 6.0, which is a real DOG!!! I solved that by not using it. My other "deal killer" gripe has also been fixed. The OCR module modified in V.11.2 (and continued in 12.0) has been fixed and it now OCR's properly into Excel. For the most part it now works as well V.11.0 for me.

Are we now living happily ever after? Not quite. The interface takes some getting used to. I prefer the old style, especially in "Image View" mode. I liked the controls on the screen instead of having to wade thru the ribbon tabs. Yes, you can put the most used commands on the Quick Access Tool Bar, but, IMO, the icons on that bar are really too small. (By contrast, the icons on the ribbon are too big.)

By default, the "Print to PaperPort" using PaperPort Image Printer or scanning docs into PP saves PDF files at 200 dpi. This is too low a resolution for an accurate OCR. I changed it to 600 and it OCR's fine now. The Image Printer is more stable than the old Black Ice drivers in V. 11.0. When you print to PP 12.1 it no longer comes to the top when to starting or when the item is inserted in your PP folder. This is a nice change.

Another gripe is with the ribbon interface. As I said in the initial review, it better than most I have used, but you still have hunt for stuff that used to be easy to find.

When it loads or when you change folders, it takes longer to redraw the screen than in older versions. If you have a lot of items in a folder it is a noticeable delay.

I have my Windows Task Bar on the left side of the screen in a vertical position. When I start PP in full screen mode it will shift the PP window to the right the width of the Task Bar (you can see the desktop in this gap). If the Task Bar is at the top of the screen the same thing happens. The wider the Task Bar the wider the gap. If you shrink the window and then maximize it it does so correctly and will continue to do so until you close the program. The Task Bar on the right side? It works correctly.

All in all, do I think you should buy V. 12.1? If you've never used PP before, YES, but make sure it's V.12.1. PP does too many things that no other program does, and for the most part does them pretty well. Should you upgrade from a previous version? Not, IMO, if you have a working version you can live with and you aren't planning on going to Win 7. The ribbon interface is a pain to work with and there isn't much other added value to this version.

Based on the updated version I upgraded my rating from two to four stars.

Do not, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, consider buying the product. I just spent three hours with their "tech support" trying to get it to work. PaperPort 11, although a buggy piece of junk, at least worked on Windows 7. Although they profess support for Windows 7, PaperPort 12 works differently, and requires specific TWAIN drivers for scanners (at least, for my HP 8300c). After spending many hours with their tech support, going round in circles (it always ended up with "Call HP for the latest drivers", which I already have, I finally decided that my time was worth more than the purchase price, which I will just forfeit. If you value your time and/or money, pass on this product at least until they iron out the issues.

Do not become an early adopter of Paperport Pro 12. If you must, buy version 11.2 instead. Nuance does not adequately support or patch their products.

I was an early adopter of Paperport Pro 11 (v 11.0). The bugs were intolerable. In particular, opening a PDF with the PDF viewer caused my computer to freeze irreparably. The only solution was a hard restart of the system, a problem that eventually led to a hard drive crash. At other times, Paperport Pro 11 would simply close without warning.

Bugs are a part of software development. Good QA corrects most before release, but some will always persist. Post-release bug fixes and patches are an integral part of the development process. Here, Nuance fails.

Nuance identifies bugs, fixes them in subsequent new install releases, BUT NEVER (not since Paperport 10) RELEASES PATCHES to the installed base. Please check the support section of their website [...], select Paperport and XP. As of September 2009, you will see no patches, though they have released version 11.1 and 11.2 to market for XP with bug fixes.

I have Paperport 11.0, which is unusable, and they have not released patches to bring my installed version up to the current 11.2 release. They have fixed the software, but if you bought before the current release, they won't let you have the patches that make it work.

Most software have updates every now and then to fix problems. The only thing you get from Nuance when you look to update, or worse, when you are told that you need an update is a message trying to sell you one of their other poorly supported software products.

Buy an older version from a friend if you have to have their software or wait a year or so till the product is produced in its final form.

Another complete waste of money from Nuance. Although Nuance claims better performance, opening PDF files actually seems to take longer. In addition, PDF files are now locked when you open them in the viewer, so you can no longer move them in the Desktop. This makes it very cumbersome to move files around. The indexer is just as atrocious, limited and buggy as it was in Paperport 11. There still isn't a preview in Desktop (as opposed to opening up a second program to view the contents). The image viewer crashes after viewing one image. Not worth upgrading to. Not worth buying.

I have used PaperPort for document management since its version 6 when I got it with my Xerox Documate Scanner and it works with your scanner to scan all your paper documents as PDF files. It has worked with every scanner I tried - Xerox Documate 252, HP 5350, Dell 1600, Dell 2335n, Brother 9840 etc. The main utility of this program is that it converts scanned documents into PDF format, which is more widely recognized and uses less disk space than JPEG format which is the default file type for a lot of the scanners. Another good thing that I liked was the FormTyper which you could use to fill the scanned forms, although it was cumbersome to use because first you have to convert the PDF file into the PaperPort (max) format. PDF Create, which is part of PaperPort lets you print anything as a PDF document on the computer. A new feature they have added in version 12 is the ability to convert digital camera images into text. These days everybody has a cell phone with camera which you carry with you all the time, unlike a scanner, and is handy. So far, I have not tested this feature personally.

But the program is painfully slow and buggy: takes forever to install, start and scan. And it does lot of annoying things, for example, when I installed paperPort 12 it uninstalled my PDF Converter program! Instead of getting better and faster, each new version is worse than the previous one! Version 12 is much slower than version 11. They have replaced FormTyper with PDF Viewer Plus, which obviates the need to convert PDF forms to max format but is pretty much unusable. Nuance has the worst activation policy I have encountered. Paperport 12 has several component programs but they give you only one serial number. So they activated Paperport 12, but when I try to use the other components - PDF Viewer Plus and PDF Create, I get a message "The number of allowable activations has been exceeded." Can you get more absurd and ridculous? So I have been unable to use the other components of the same program! These idiots at Nuance do not even their dogfood.

Paperport 12 installs an automatic upgrade tool which starts with Windows startup and slows down your computer. I hate it when programs install junkware like that, particularly which starts on computer startup and makes your computer crawl. Last time I upgraded paperPort version 11, the program stopped working and would freeze up. I had to uninstall the upgrade and go back to my original version 11 install. Nuance does not test its products thoroughly before putting them up for sale. PaperPort is infected with "featuritis" - so many features which most users don't use but slow down the program for everyone. Programmers and software engineers did not spend a few hundred hours to trim the code and make the program nimble, so you have to spend hours of extra time in front of the computer. Nuance has totally ruined Paperport.

For a long time PaperPort had no reasonably priced competition because Adobe Acrobat Pro is exorbitantly priced. Thats why Nuance has been getting away by making each version of PaperPort and slower and buggier. But now there are other programs which can duplicate the function of PaperPort at less cost and they are faster. For example twenty bucks Scan to PDF will scan your documents as PDF and PDF Xchange Viewer will let you fill the forms or create PDF files from other programs. Folder management is really the duplication of Windows Explorer functionality.

PaperPort 12 is so bad that on one computer i uninstalled it and went back to my original PaperPort 11 with PDF Converter 5. On another computer I uninstalled PaperPort completely and am using Scan to PDF to capture scanned documents into PDF files, PDF Exchange to fill PDF forms and Windows Explorer for file management.

I liked Nuance's program PDF Converter 5 but I think the cheaper and faster way of doing what PaperPort does is by using two different programs: Scan to PDF to use with scanner to scan everything as PDF file and PDF Exchange to modify PDF files or fill forms etc. This combination will give you all useful features without the slow and buggy PaperPort 12 at a lesser price. Nuance has ruined the newer version of PDF Converter 6 by doing the same thing - making it slower and buggier.

My recommendation: do not to buy this slow and buggy PaperPort 12. If you have an old version of PaperPort, stick with it. If you are a new user, you will get faster and cheaper solution with using two separate programs - Scan to PDf for ten bucks and PDF Exchange for thirty five.

There is a number of features removed from version 12 that were in the previous version 11
for Acrobat PDF documents such as: Enhance, Select Image Area, Copy, Cut, Paste, Convert, etc.
Removal of these features was not disclosed in the announcements of Version 12.
Furthermore, the installation of Version 12 removed the previous version.
In the previous version I had about 25 profiles for scanning.
Installing version 12 removed all of them. After I went back to version 11,
I spent half a day recreating these scan profiles.
Bottom line: Release 12 is a crippled version of Release 11.
I returned version 12 and will continue using version 11.

I have used the paperport products for years and updated to 12 the moment it was released. Unfotunately PP12 Professional's ability to work as advertised is a sometime thing. It usually works on small scanning jobs (1 or 2 pages), often freezes on larger jobs (10 plus pages), but also seems effected by how many documents you have scanned as well. So trying to scan 30 two page documents will probably have PP12 stop working several times. Each time, not only does the program need to be restarted, but so does the computer! What fun (humor). I always thought that it was because I didn't have a powerful enough computer, so I could never be sure who was to blame. Now I have a new, windows 7 PC, with plenty of ram, and I can safely say that the problem lies with PP12. The program is a productivity killer, and I think we should use this board to discuss better alternatives.

Let me explain how I come up with a one-star rating for PaperPort 12 as follows.

The design brief and the features as listed above (and there are more) describe a potentially useful tool in document image management. It is not perfect, however, as there could be more useful features that have been suggested to the company in the past. Therefore, I would give the product four stars for the design brief.

As a successor version to the previous edition, PaperPort 11, there has been little additional or improved functionality. Therefore, I would assign a one-star rating to the up-grade aspect of PaperPort 12.

Where the product really falls down is on the engineering, or actual implementation, of the design brief. In my personal use of PaperPort 12, I have experienced performance problems, or "bugs", and I have seen other unresolved problems reported on user-oriented websites. I also had performance issues with PaperPort 11 which were never fully resolved. I bought 12 mainly in the unfulfilled hopes that the newer version would cure those problems. While it did to a certain extent, it brought new problems that were even worse. Therefore, I rate PaperPort 12 as minus-two-stars on engineering execution. The low level of product execution is beyond anything I have yet encountered. Nuance encourages users to report bugs to its website but specifically states that they won't be fixed until the next (presumably not free) version if at all.

And this is not offset by technical support; to the contrary, Nuance's technical support is another major negative for this product. Nuance provides one free call to tech support with the purchase of a new product. This is almost certainly a waste of the caller's time. Somewhat more free support is available on line, my experience with it so far has been terrible. Immediately after I purchased the product, I reported a problem. Since then, I have been treated dismissively. Tech services' replies run to several days and then tend to ask questions from which one can infer that they did not believe my previous reports. For instance, they asked for screen shots of conditions I had already described in a text report. They tried to close the thread as resolved, knowing that my problem still continued. Even though I am a very experienced user of the product and had been a company-selected beta-tester of earlier versions, tech services continued to treat me as an idiot.

Also, the company engages in some thuggish practices with its pay-for-use technical support. For instance, when I complained about the way PaperPort 11 was performing for me, the tech support instructed me to download a newer version of the program that partially resolved my problems. For this tacit acknowledgement of inherent engineering weaknesses in the version I bought, I was charged $20. Therefore, I rate Nuance and PaperPort 12 as minus-two-stars on technical support. There is a non-affiliated user group on Yahoo whose members tend to have better product knowledge than the company's tech support representatives and freely offer many more practical solutions than Nuance's tech support could ever dream of, although the useful stuff is nearly drowned out with off-topic political, personal, computer hardware, and "humor"(?) chat.

Therefore and with great regret, I assign a blended one-star rating to PaperPort 12. For what it's worth, I have uninstalled 12 and have reverted to 11. In my use, it is not as imperfect as is PaperPort 12. I have had entirely satisfactory experience with other Nuance products (Omnipage, PDF Converter, and Dragon Naturally Speaking) so it is difficult to understand why PaperPort does not work for me. But it doesn't.

Just like the rest of the reviewers, I have used Paperport software for over 9 years at home and at work. Paperport is a great tool to have. The old versions were not always compatible with newer operating systems with tricky and rough installation process. Last month I decided to upgrade to Version 12. I am totally disappointed. Instead of making the software stable and reliable, they have added a bunch of new minor and useless features which is fine but the key features have been re-arranged in a way that you have to take additional steps to get your job done. I could live with that too, but having a software that's unstable and buggy, buggy and buggy puts it over the top. It kept crashing my other programs with memory errors. I had to uninstall it and reinstall much older version. At least I know the kinks in the old version. Extremely disappointed with version 12. What a waste. I recommend finding an old copy or wait until they fix all the bugs.