Customer Reviews

PaperPort Deluxe 8.0

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

 

 

I heard about Paperport from word of mouth. I've spent a number of hours researching the product, emailing tech support, and reading reviews from leading publications and users. It appears most users dogged technical support, so I took the test myself and emailed tech support to see if they support my HP all-in-one machine (OfficeJet G55). Support responded within 48 hours unlike the remarks I've read where they received poor tech support at unreasonable response times.

At any rate, I opened and loaded the software on my Toshiba XP enabled laptop. Installation was easy, and without reading the instructions manual, I was able to easily create folders and scan documents. PaperPort easily recognized my scanner.

In terms of software, this purchase has to rank among the most value received as my desk is becoming less of a paper pile and more of a desk. The quality of the scan is pretty good too, even capturing the creases of folded papers.

I highly recommend this product as the use and ROI of my scanner is in full swing with the use of PaperPort.

NOTE:
Recently downgraded to 2 stars due to software using 100% CPU and crashing my laptop. (laptop turns off) I have a 1.13GHZ P4 with 512MB RAM and the CPU utilization of the software is too heavy intensive!!

I've noticed several reviews here that comment on lack of support for Windows XP and a bug related to CPU usage. I just wanted to let folks know that there is now a patch available on scansoft.com that fixes these issues.

I use PaperPort 8 on Windows XP Pro and Home on a daily basis without any serious problems.

For anyone who felt that the paperwork scene in the movie "Brazil" hit a little too close to home (the man is buried alive in paper), this software can be your saviour. For online reference, the first thing I turn to is a search engine, and once your paperwork is in Paperport, you can search all your own information the same way. "I think I put that folder over here" turns into search button, 'Contract +"Bernard Inc"' and poof, you're looking at it. I use it for all my work and personal documents, like recipts, contracts, faxes, bills (just virtually 'stack' the bill with a copy of your cheque or online recipt and you can quicly show you've paid it).
I also use it for training course notes, and wish I had it in college.

This software installs easily, and runs reliably. I haven't needed to call support, so I can't vouch for or against them.

Cool advantages:
+ Quick fulltext searching of those stacks of paper on your desk
+ Quick fulltext searching of all those resumes, contracts, etc that are attatched to incoming emails. Searches all my word documents, etc.. :-D
+Ability to select and copy text from an image. Example: indexing newspaper articles during research, later searching them, viewing a scan of the original, and then being able to copy out peices of text from the image as plain text into your essay.

There are some serious lacking features though:
-#1 pain: Poor support for Adobe PDF format. Paperport's own format has no advantages over PDF, and showing PDFs as icons instead of stacked thumbnails is a pain. Plus sending someone a document requires a special viewer. C'mon Adobe, buy them out and replace the format with Adobe PDF.
- Poor group support. There are subscription services that let you share some documents on their servers online, but the thoght of relying on my internet to get info, along with paying money for 3rd party server solutions when I have servers right here turned me off.
- A little heavy on the CPU at times. Sure, OCRing is one of those high-intensity processes, and 99% of the time it just sits in the backgound whne you don't need it, but scanning in a stack of documents that you want fulltext indexed leaves you daydreaming of a dual P4.

I would reccomend this software to small business owners and,students, and researchers as a way to carry tons of paperwork information at your fingertips in a searchable, orgainized, portable format. I love my copy and use it all the time. I'll give it 5 stars when they fix the above annoyences.

I have a paperless home now, thanks to PaperPort Deluxe. I've used it since the early versions.

I scan all of my bills, and store them electronically.

However, I recommend getting version 9. The primary file type documents are stored in is the propriatary MAX file format and extension. Version 9 has a PDF file generator, and the MAX file viewer may eventually go the way of the dinosaur. Only this company's products use it, and it's not directly supported in Windows. Company mergers and buyouts happen all of the time, but I have a feeling that PDF will be supported for many many years to come. Version 8 will store MOST PDF files, but won't generate them from scanned pages. Some encodings of PDF files will for some reason not open in version 8. Version 9 seems to handle them all.

If you only want to keep papers short term, this version is more than adequate. But if you're looking at 5-20 year retention, then you really should get the version 9 for the PDF capability. I say 5 years is critical, because future versions of Windows may eventually stop supporting this version of the program. For example, this software will NOT load on Windows 3.1...and may barely load on Windows 95. Operating systems do move ahead, and companies often just release new software to keep up.

I upgraded to Paperport 8 when I will upgraded to Windows XP. I have been using Paperport for many years. I keep hard copies very few documents. Other than my tax return, pretty much everything else is filed electronically.

I originally used PaperPort to organize my scanned documents but have found that it allows me to have a virtually paperless office. With PaperPort, you can create folders and subfolders just as you would organize a file cabinet. You can scan your documents to these different folders. Even better, you can select PaperPort as your printer and print directly to PaperPort. For example if you purchased something online, you would "print" the receipt to your designated PaperPort folder and never have to deal with a sheet of paper. You can similarly store downloaded items from the Internet, such as a bill or bank statement. You can electronically file any document from any application that allows you to print.

It's easy-to-use interface also allows you to drag the scanned item to different applications you might have, such as your faxing software, Outlook, or Adobe Acrobat. You can also use it to save a file into jpeg or other formats.

I have not experienced the CPU drain that others describe. I am using PaperPort on a computer with 512 MB of RAM.

The PaperPort Deluxe 8.0 program looked good, ...

HOWEVER,

A) After installing the program, cannot open any Word 2002 documents. Get "not enough memory" errors (512 MB on that machine). After UN-Installing PaperPort, Word runs fine (ie. no errors and open all docs fine).

B) When trying to open a single 50 Kilobyte Adobe Acrobat PDF file on a network drive, the program sits there for approximately 5 minutes then displays an error "Ut Oh - Cannot Open This File." Our test file was two pages of text only using Times Roman font. No images.

C) ScanPort supposedly offers A 30 day money back guarantee. After using the form on their site ... we received a reply [that] had a phone number to call for an RMA. We called, they asked us to fax our receipt, other info for an RMA. It has been two weeks now and we have not yet received our RMA or instructions on how to return. The last tech support person I spoke to said they had an extremely large amount of email and phone requests to process.

PaperPort has been in this segment since the beginning. I install paperport many times a week in conjunction with other products. This product, overall, is excellent but the current version is still a work in progress from my perspective.

Version 8 does not work consistently with XP and they have no patches nor respond to this issue via email. Version 8 is also unstable with W2K. I have not tried it with W95-98 O/S family.

Version 7 (with patch) works with W2k and is stable. It misses a few features that v8 has, but it works consistently.

Forget this product if you use Terminal Server. These comments are based on my own experience and may be different from the experience of others. I use this product daily and recommend it.

I have been using PaperPort 8.0 since it's release and I'm glad to say that it delivered as claimed. I have literally converted over 15 years of paper files, receipts treasured letters and more into digital data. Burned the data to a CD the clutter is gone and the data is secure. The drag and drop features make PaperPort 8.0 a breeze to work with. It has performed flawlessly. The Photo enhancing features could stand minor improvements but overall I'm extremely pleased with the product. PaperPort 8.0 is perfect for novice, the expert or simply the person who wants to organize documents, photos or practically anything. And, might I add very user friendly. Get organized, try PaperPort 8.0. I haven't encountered a problem to date. It's perfect for me, it might be for you also.

I have purchased Paperport deluxe 8.0 to replace the now orphaned Pagekeeper Pro. I've installed the product on a Windows 2000 system with plently of CPU (1GHz) and Memory (512 MB)resources that has been stably running for more than a year. Now after using Paperport for a period of 1-15 minutes the PC abruptly shuts down and reboots. No error messages!

It appears that such behavior is preceded with 100% CPU utilization by the Paperport executable. Tech support reported that this is a known issue with the Paperport printer driver in Win2K with no workarounds and no known date of a bug fix. I have been out of [price] and I can't use the program. Further issues with the product relate to its inability to save the scanned files in anything but its own proprietary format meaning that whatever you scan now is forever locked in Scansoft and its support...

Don't buy it!

Works great for me.
I showed it to coworker's (whose scanners came with a different software package) and they liked it so much that they ordered paperport for their systems.

Stable. Not buggy.

All around nice program.