Customer Reviews

PaperPort Deluxe 9

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I purchased this product with great excitement, as I had been using Pagis Pro and was looking forward to converting all files to pdf format for easy file sharing. However this product is a huge disappointment. First, it is extremely slow to load, and even slower printing last night it took me 8 minutes to print a 10 page pdf. I opened the same file in Acrobat and it printed in 30 seconds. (BTW the printer I used was a new HP 3330 with the latest drivers!) It is one of the few programs that I have ever used that can lock up windows 2000, an amazing feat in and of itself. Then, for more added excitement many of the features dont work. They advertise a scan to email feature- great if you can get it to work, I never could and there is not support in manual or online for this feature. Then when printing to pdf the option to allow you to view your work after saving it- will not work -ever. What a pain to create a pdf doc then to have to navigate via explorere to open it and make sure you actually created it! Another huge annoyance is that you must use the My Documents directory on your c drive as the default to save your docs! You cannot change this!! Your only other option is to save to the last directory used. Well if you dont remember the last directory you used and you use the "send to bar" have fun on your scavenger hunt. In short its horribly slow, locks up, and many of the features flat out dont work and there is no support. I give up they win. What a shame. I think this product was rushed to market to beat the new Adobe Acrobat 6 to market. I plan to take this product back to Staple (hopefully they will let me) do get Adobe. This product is clearly a full iteration away from being useful. Wait for version 10. Hope this helps

I've used PaperPort 7.0 for many years to store scanned images of my financial data. My biggest reason for upgrading from 7.0 to 9.0 was because PaperPort 9.0 can now save files as Adobe Acrobat PDF files. It can also convert existing PaperPort MAX files to PDF via the Save As function. So far, this is what I've found:

Irritations: First, PaperPort 9.0 insists on creating a folder in My Documents entitled "My PaperPort Documents." You can cosmetically rename it WITHIN PaperPort to anything you want. But, you can't actually change the name that Windows itself shows and you can't delete it (except via a Registry hack). You can delete everything out of the folder and use whatever other folders you want, but still, it's irritating that the folder exists. Another irritation is with the version numbering. I actually downloaded the upgrade from Scansoft's site. According to their site, with the latest Service Pack (SP-2), the latest version should be "9.0, SP-2 (9.0.0.503)." In my case, under Help -> About PaperPort, I show a version of "9.0 (9.1.0.497)." So, I'm not sure what I have (I'm missing the SP-2 designation, but I have a higher version number). PaperPort 9.0 does have a "Get Latest Updates" function under Help -> ScanSoft on the Web, and it says I'm fully up-to-date. So, I'm a tad confused.

Problems: The first glitch I ran into was when I was batch converting folders full of MAX files to PDF files. In a few cases, the new files didn't name correctly, so I had to copy the old names and paste them on the new documents. That problem seems to be related to the existence of periods in the document names. The next, and more serious, problem is that it doesn't handle multiple page printing of PDFs properly. I tried printing some stacks of PDFs to my Tektronix Phaser 740 Postscript color laser printer (on my network (not shared)). Stacks of 8 and 6 pages just timed out. A single page PDF prints fine. If I duplicate twice that properly-printing page and either stack and print those two pages or just print the two pages as one operation, the first page prints, but the second doesn't. Any time a page prints, it's followed by a printed Postscript "ERROR: ioerror, OFFENDING COMMAND: image" page. I'm assuming this is what's stopping multiple page PDFs from printing.

From within Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.1, I can print the smaller PDFs fine (the 6 and 8 page ones still time out).

If I unstack objects and separately print each page in it's own operation, I can get everything printed (with a doubling of used pages since each page generates that error page). Also, if I re-convert the PDF back to a MAX file, it prints fine. For instance, I re-converted that non-printing 8 page PDF stack (about 3.9MB) to a MAX stack (about 4.5MB). It printed in about 13 minutes (which seems reasonable for that file size). So, it is possible to work around this problem.

Another problem was mentioned by j. zehala, here. PaperPort's ScanDirect program allows you to scan a document directly to other applications (no need to open up PaperPort). Though it offers the theoretical capability to scan directly to my copy of Outlook, the file it attaches to the email doesn't arrive with an extension and there doesn't seem to be any way to rename it. Thus, Windows won't open the attachment. The work-around I found was to scan the document into Paperport and then just drag it onto an email. The other problem j. zehala mentions (Print to PDF) I can't reproduce: with PaperPort set to default to PDFs, telling a program to print using one of PaperPort's print drivers puts the file right in the last folder used in PaperPort (which is where the program will open).

In general, I'm fairly satisfied with the program. Once I get the printing problem solved, I'll be very satisfied. But, whatever you do, make sure you either go to Scansoft's web site or do the "Get Latest Updates" from within the program itself. As of this writing, SP-2 is out and it's supposed to correct many problems.

Paperport is not the first document management program I have used, but it is the best. Version 9 has a great feature of scanning to PDF, which I set as the default save file type (otherwise, it scans to Paperport's proprietary MAX format). Paperport allows you to significantly decrease your paper count, as documents that you may have held on to can now be scanned and discarded. You can create any number of folders to categorize the scanned documents.

Paperport has been extremely reliable and has not given any problems in working with my Epson scanner. I've noticed that many of the negative reviews outline problems in doing more complex tasks such as batch conversion of files. As my workload is much simpler, I haven't used these advanced features and haven't run into any problems. And Paperport definitely beats any other document management software out on the market.

The scanning workflow in Paperport is a little awkward for multi-page documents, and you are indeed limited to having "My Paperport documents" be the default folder for storing your files. This hasn't been too much of a problem for me yet, as long as I remember to back up that folder along with everything else. Overall, Paperport has uncluttered my office area quite a bit since I started using it.

I absolutely love this program. Easy to install and fast. I have converted many documents to electrons using Paperport version #9 and I love it. It converts them to .pdf files quickly and automatically and they print as fast as any other documents. I am in the process of converting all my files from paper to electrons and this software is the most saytisfying I have purchased in quite a while. No installation problems (Win XP pro and a Pentium 4 - 2.8.). Absolutely love it.

I was using Paperport 8.0 on Windows XP with a Visoneer scanner.
I installed 9.0, and it is full of bugs:
(1) Scan Settings does not work, and requires a patch from the
their website.
(2) The restore Defaults button does not work
(3) The scanner freezes mid-scan
etc...

I scanned a decade worth of personal papers like tax returns and such into Paperport 9 Deluxe. I move around a lot and I am glad to turn all those papers into electrons. I have a HP All in One printer, the HP 5510. I have never had any problems with the software. It parks all your documents into thumbnails which are easy to view without opening them. The software is just basically like having a big file cabinet. The only two critisms I can make is one: saved web pages into PDF do not come out very good. The text in a saved web page looks sloppy. And for me the web capture capability does not scroll the page down to capture the whole page like it is supposed to. It always only captures the visible portion of what is on the monitor. Paperport is making me buy PDF Create when I shouldn't have to. (It better work better!) Secondly, I wish Paperport had some backup capability built in.

After reading all the negative review, I was going to pass on this version - that would have been a mistake. Installation on an XP Based Dell with HP7130 multi went quite smoothly. Loaded an update and rebooted - all were recognized and functioning quite smoothly. This was installed over Version 6.0 Paperport. While converting files from max to pdf was a bit of a problem - that was a one time (though fairly lengthy) procedure.
While it does create a default directory (which is differenet from the one I actually use) - in the options you can direct it to open up from where you left off. So I just directed it to my regular directory. The other one still is there but basically as an empty line.

Pros: PDF format is a big improvement of the max. Web capture to save my web pages in pdf files (either in color or B&W (save space).
Was considering buying a separate program to allow me to create pdf documents from MS Word. With this - you have a Paperport windows printer - that prints to a pdf format.
Only a couple of problems with system hanging up - vs. frequently on version 6.0.

Cons:
No serious ones so far - depending on my experience over the next 60-90 days the rating may go to either 3 or 5 stars.

I needed a document management system. After looking for software, there only appeared to be Paperport.

I had read somewhere that the software becomes incredibly slow with a large number of files. I guessed a large number meant 2500+ at least.

This concerned me, so I called pre-sales at ScanSoft, and asked if it was slow with a large number of files. He was not sure! So he told me to call technical. I called technical, and it his responses were very slow and sounded like he was reading them out to me. I asked if he was reading the ScanSoft website and he said yes, so I hung up. Obviously I read their site for an answer, and did not need to be paying international call charge for someone who seemed less knowledgeable than myself to read it.

I got the software. Basically all the software consists of is windows explorer and scanning software. It worked well, and I thought OK, expensive for what it is, when Windows Explorer and scanning software (usually free) would nearly do most of it, but THEN after around 560 PDFs, it started running VERY slow.

I thought it was my machine so installed it and the PDFs on a new Vaio 1.7Mhz, 1 gig laptop. Same problem. If you click to view the PDF then hit the return back, it takes 12 seconds! So if you view a document, it takes a good few seconds but then when you hit back to the Paperport Desktop to continue it takes 12 seconds!!! Completely unusuable!

If you have less than 500 files, it is maybe expensive software, but for more than 500 do not waste you money. It runs so slow you can not use it. I wonder how ScanSoft get away with it - surely they should have tested it internally with thousands of files.

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I first went the [Scansoft] Pagis route, putting thousands of business docs in their format, hoping to get better at using it and all the supposed features. I was dutifully getting each new version, adding the scarce patches, hoping that the next would fix some of it's many problems... but it never got much better.

I am coming to believe that after ScanSoft dumped all of the Pagis users to the wolves, they re-bagged it and called it PaperPort.

I say this because all the program problems are there, and the same poor customer support is back with it - problems are sometimes acknowledged but never really fixed. If all you do is store and search, it might be ok, but if you try to use other more advanced features, they often don't work.

Just enough is done to make it work, kind of, and that seems to be where it stands. If you look back at the horror stories of those who trusted Pagis, you might want to be careful that this situation, looking a lot like the one we Pagis users went through, doesn't turn out the same way.

I have a clean, modern system and a powerful machine, and it had problems with printing, scanning and keyword scans. Also, data was lost.

Deja Vue all over again... ;-(

With my last experience with Scansoft,I can't take that chance again, can you ??

Ed Judge

I have used both Paperport 8 and Paperport 9 Deluxe for over a year so I am qualified to report.

Both pieces of software have some form of severe incompatibility with Windows XP Pro.

I cannot really get version 9 to operate. Everytime I try its like cold molasses. Click...wait....wait....wait...wait...and then lock up.

I'm very experienced. I've been working with PCs since 1991. Every other piece of software I've loaded works very well...except for Paperport 8 and 9.

In theory Paperport 9 should be fine because it converts all scans to PDF which is more or less a universal file format. However theory is a lot better than reality.

Support is nonexistent from ScanSoft. If you pay the $19.95 per incident, you still do not get a solution.

The ScanSoft forum is always either not working (another bad sign) or it's full of people complaining about the software and lack of support.

Unfortunately there are not a lot of alternatives, but doQments looks promising.

Avoid Paperport unless you have money and time to waste.