Customer Reviews

Paperport Pro 9.0 Office CANADA95/98/NT/WME/W2K

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I am really impressed with the new PaperPort Pro Office. I read the PC Magazine review (5-of-5 Stars) which was very favorable, but I didn't expect to be this pleased. I get PDF creation, scan to PDF, document management and photo-thumbnails all in one application. It does something I haven't seen anywhere else - it lets me stack and unstack my digital documents as if they were paper! This is really useful for anyone who is trying to combine Word pages with Excel or PowerPoint pages. Simply convert each into PDF, then order the pages.

The program adds document management to my current folders. I just Added Folders to the file tree view, and there it was. It includes an OCR engine for indexing scanned paper, faxes, etc. so I can find paper, PDF, photos and digital documents in one search (something I can't do with Windows Explorer). It lets me add meta data to my digital photo's, and searches on that.

It is really a bargain ... especially when you add up what it would cost to get Acrobat, a document management app, and photo-thumbnails. I am using it on Windows XP and it works great.

I have been using PaperPort for over four years. It is an outstanding product that everyone should own. I have loaded thousands of documents onto my computer, emptying an entire filing cabinet. I have also eliminated the filing of incoming bills, invoices, and other things that come in the mail. Now I never have to ask myself, "should I keep this?". I just scan it and toss it in the trash. For critical documents, I scan and then toss them in a rubber container that I save as a backup. Nothing collects around my home or office.

Windows "My Documents" Integration

I have integrated PaperPort with Windows XP's "My Documents" allowing me to view and manage all of my documents, photos, PDFs, and scaned document through a single file structure manageable through PaperPort. There is no better gain in productivity than having your whole work life in a single structure accessible through a single powerful tool. PaperPort will turn your images, scans, and saved Office documents into thumbnails, so you can find what you're looking for visually, and it will OCR them into its search engine, so you can search for that important document by a keyword. Additionally, anything you can print, you can send directly to PaperPort using PaperPort's faux print driver.

Productivity Gainer

All document formats (Scans, PDFs, Excel, Word, etc) come together through a single view of multiple thumbnail images. Click on a folder in the folder structure on the left, and all of the documents appear as small images on the right. "Color code" your folders (i.e. directories) so you can find what you need visually. Want to send someone a scanned document in another format, such as TIF? Just right click on the document and export it to the TIF format or any supported format you would like. Want to find all scanned and saved documents that contain "BMW"? Just type it in to the search feature and your whole auto history appears.

Digital Photography

I also use PaperPort with my Canon digital camera. I use it to manage my photos and to turn them into websites, complete with thumbnails and descriptions. Through the automatic website creation feature, family and friends are able to see my selected photos. They visit my PaperPort created website, click on the thumbnails, and see a larger image. I also take digital photos of "whiteboard" diagrams at work and keep them in PaperPort.

Conclusion

There are few programs that have done so much to move people from the paper world to a document management world. Don't hire an organization expert or get a bigger office, just buy PaperPort and a fast scanner (USB 2.0 or SCSI) with an automatic document feeder (ADF) or buy something like the HP1220 document feed scanner/laser printer combo, and move your life to PaperPort.

I am a long time user of PaperPort, and I think this verison is by far the best. By basing the entire product on the PDF file format, PaperPort is now one of the most useful products on my machine. The speed and stability issues mentioned in reviews above have all been ironed out in 3 service packs released over the last several months, and the last pack seems to fix all the major issues. Why is this version so godd?

- I can create PDF files from any type of document (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) and combine them right on the PaperPort desktop by right-clicking and stacking.

- I can scan paper documents into PDF, add electronic annotations and then email them to lawyers, accountants, mortgage brokers and all the other people who ask me to fax them things. It is so much faster and reliable to email instead, and with PDF files, I know they can open it on their computer and see it just as I did.

- The new "batch processing" feature lets me clean-up multiple scanned documents at one time and also apply a clean-up operation to all the pages of a single document. This is way better than it was in v8.

These are just a few of the reasons why the new verison is great. As further proof of this, PC Magazine named PaperPort one of the top 100 technologies for 2003 (one of only 6 productivity software titles along with Microsoft Office 2003 and QuickBooks.) Smart Computing put PaperPort on its top 50 list, and there are numerous other great reviews out there as well.

Don't let the few angry people here give you the wrong idea about PaperPort 9. It's great.

I have been a dedicated PaperPort user for many years. I was surprised when I went to purchase the product and saw all of these terrible reviews. Since I had such a good experience for so many years I decided to give it a try. ScanSoft offers a 30 day refund policy there was no way I could loose. After using the product for a few weeks, I have found that this new version is the best yet. The software is much easier to use and faster when scanning large batches of documents. I have been using the FormTyper feature and found it very useful for completing paper documnts with information and saving a copy for my records - much easier than completing them by hand and then making a copy. I also have been using the tools to edit pictures from my digital camera.

I also have used PaperPort since version 1. I have almost 10 years ( 2 gigs) of files and documents in PaperPort. It is a critical necessity to my business and my computer "life"--I upgraded to version 9.0 in March; later installed each of the two service packs. I can no longer print to PaperPort from the Internet. System locks up frequently, requiring hard boots. I paid ... for technical assistance--no response from Scansoft.

I give up! I had downloaded my old version 8. I stupidly erased that copy when version 9.0 seemed to be working OK (before the service packs). ...

I agree, stick with PaperPort version 8.

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... This product is clearly a full iteration away from being useful. Wait for version 10. Hope this helps

I am comparing Paperport 9 to Paperport 8. My major use is to store documents for future viewing and to maintain a record of my trading cards. I have no use for scanning into Adobe for later editing so I use the .max format. I own two scanners - a SCSII A4 scanner and a Parallell port A3 Scanner. Scanning documents is easy, especially with the ability to keep on scanning pages which are automatically stacked into a single file. However saving the document is very slow. Loading documents appears to take far too long. Loading a 200 dpi A4 page takes about 3 seconds with Paperport 8 and about 10 seconds with Paperport 9. Loading a 600 dpi trading card (6cm by 10 cm approx) - in Paperport 8 the picture starts to appear after 3 seconds and completes in steps in about 10 seconds - in Paperport 9 nothing happens for about 30 seconds and then suddenly the whole image appears.
Editing the document in Paperport 9 - enhancing, rotating, straightening - is fast about 2 or 3 times as fast as in 8. But after straightening, all straight lines become jagged - something that didn't happen in Paperport 8.
Saving is again very slow taking about 20 seconds to save a trading card. However try loading an A4 document at 600 dpi. My system hung 3 times (which isn't bad in XP). I gave up.

I saw a pretty negative review of PaperPort on here, and all I can say is that I have had a 180 degree experience - I love it. First, I was able to add my existing folders and files to the tree view with a right click>> add folders, so it I didn't have to use the default folder view. I actually mapped a network drive to it as easy as Windows Explorer. The PDF it creates works fine, and I've shared documents with people using free reader with ease. I get PDF, document management, workflow and more for a price that is well below Acrobat - which basically creates and annotates PDF.

Being a long time user of PaperPort since version 1, I'm profoundly disappointed by Paperport 9.0 Pro Office, top of the line of the Paperport series. When it was released in March 2003, it contained a huge number of anomalies. As of today, Scansoft, publisher of Paperport, have already released two service packs. Nonetheless, it's still buggy. For example, after scanning a page such as your normal electrical bills, you will "straighten" the image to correct some minor rotation when placing the paper on the scanner. All lines are distorted after straightening, a bug never found in any of previous versions. When scanning color page in 8-bit color, it will inflate the file size by automatically converting the image to 24-bit colors without your knowledge.

As of day, Scansoft never replied any of technical problems I submitted since I bought the upgrade at $$$ on March 26, 2003. All they did is to assign me a PIN number on June 20, 2003. Above all, they refuse to refund the non-performing product on the ground that my request exceeded their 60-day policy. Bear in mind, for the 60 days I continued to write to them and waited for their reply in vain.

The most stable version is Version 8. If you have one, don't upgrade. If you have already bought the product, please try it immediately. Once you discover any bugs, don't hesitate to return it for refund.

The only selling point of Paperport 9 is the support of Acrobat document 5. Whether it support Acrobat 6 is another question mark.

PaperPort has changed the way my company does business. With it's scan to PDF and PDF creation abilities we have turned piles of paper credit applications into electronic documents that we can easily email, store and quickly retrieve when needed by using the SimpleSearch feature. My word processors use batch processing to perform tasks on groups of documents to save even more time when reviewing the applications before we send them to their respective card issuers for approval or denial. We used to process about 2,000 applications a day, now with the help of PaperPort we can easily process over 10,000 a day with the same number of staff!