Rating: 
Summary: Perfection
Review: A real time-saver. I send literally hundreds of PDF files to clients every week. In the past, I'd create a design, e-mail a PDF to them, and they'd call back with suggestions and changes. A lot of telephone tag and a lot of redesigning. Now I have them fax or mail me their specs, I scan with OmniPage Pro 12 Office and then create a PDF with their exact specifications. Works exceptionally well and cuts down on translation mistakes. I can also convert files into HTML and post them on our Web site so clients can view our proposals whenever they want. Still learning the software-there's a lot of great features here-but I'm very pleased so far. A stellar addition to my workspace, thumbs up!
Rating:
Summary: Perfection
Review: A real time-saver. I send literally hundreds of PDF files to clients every week. In the past, I'd create a design, e-mail a PDF to them, and they'd call back with suggestions and changes. A lot of telephone tag and a lot of redesigning. Now I have them fax or mail me their specs, I scan with OmniPage Pro 12 Office and then create a PDF with their exact specifications. Works exceptionally well and cuts down on translation mistakes. I can also convert files into HTML and post them on our Web site so clients can view our proposals whenever they want. Still learning the software-there's a lot of great features here-but I'm very pleased so far. A stellar addition to my workspace, thumbs up!
Rating:
Summary: Worth a closer look
Review: An impressive upgrade. Even more accurate than version 11-nearly perfect, in fact. Nice number of editing tools make proofing easier and more efficient. If the software doesn't recognize a word, it shows it in boldface...also recognizes several foreign words, legal and medical terms. Read-back feature (computerized voice actually reads back your scanned items) is unique and helpful. Very pleased with the conversion of PDF files into documents I can edit and alter...PDF files usually drive me nuts, but they're more manageable now. Very happy I made the upgrade...well worth it!
Rating:
Summary: Worth a closer look
Review: An impressive upgrade. Even more accurate than version 11-nearly perfect, in fact. Nice number of editing tools make proofing easier and more efficient. If the software doesn't recognize a word, it shows it in boldface...also recognizes several foreign words, legal and medical terms. Read-back feature (computerized voice actually reads back your scanned items) is unique and helpful. Very pleased with the conversion of PDF files into documents I can edit and alter...PDF files usually drive me nuts, but they're more manageable now. Very happy I made the upgrade...well worth it!
Rating:
Summary: Saves time, money, paper
Review: As the office manager of a small, family-owned insurance adjusting company, I'm constantly receiving contractors' estimates via fax and mail. In the past, I had to make numerous copies for our records and to send directly to different insurance companies. OmniPage Pro 12 Office has eliminated a lot of my busy work. The scanning is top quality and seldom requires much proofing. I save all of our files in Word and Excel and e-mail them as attachments to our many clients. This saves on paper and time, giving me an opportunity to better serve existing clients and seek out new ones. Very fast and efficient; it has proven a good investment.
Rating:
Summary: Saves time, money, paper
Review: As the office manager of a small, family-owned insurance adjusting company, I'm constantly receiving contractors' estimates via fax and mail. In the past, I had to make numerous copies for our records and to send directly to different insurance companies. OmniPage Pro 12 Office has eliminated a lot of my busy work. The scanning is top quality and seldom requires much proofing. I save all of our files in Word and Excel and e-mail them as attachments to our many clients. This saves on paper and time, giving me an opportunity to better serve existing clients and seek out new ones. Very fast and efficient; it has proven a good investment.
Rating: 
Summary: Suspicious 5 star reviews on this product
Review: Crashes too much.
Look at the dates on the other reviews (all of them - about 10 at this time). Notice all the nice "5 star" reviews come in clumps on the same date (3 on one date, 2 on another, 3 on another)! Also note that nearly all the "5 star" reviews are from people who did not have any other review on Amazon. And they are all about the same length.
I trust the lower star ratings reviews on this product more than the 5 star ones. Especially the person who wrote the longish review.
Rating:
Summary: Valuable, but not the best
Review: I do a great deal of OCR in my research and have scanned thousands of pages each with OmniPage Pro 12 (OP12) and FineReader 6 (FR6). I have also made extensive use of previous versions of both programs. OP12 is a good package and can serve some needs adequately, but for my work, FR6 is superior in every respect. Others might have different preferences depending on what they do and what their equipment and software are.The bulk of my scanning/OCR involves academic articles and historical materials. For the most part I produce PDF files, although I also scan some tables to produce spreadsheets and do some scanning to Word files. Depending on the quality of the original and my precise purpose I may make a PDF with an image and hidden text, an OCR text file, or an OCR text file with images of uncertain words. I use an HP 7450 scanner connected to a Windows 2000 system with a 1.8 GHz P4 processor and 512 MB of RAM. Both do a good job of scanning. FR6 offers the option of more control over the scanning process, but OP12 generally does well with its automatic settings. OCR is another story, for several reasons. First of all, when the going gets tough, OP12 quits in a huff, at least on my system. It will suddenly crash with no warning whatever. This seems to be OCR-related, but if it happens while scanning the chances of recovering your already-scanned work are poor. For this reason, I always scan and recognize separately with OP12, since then the crashes usually do not corrupt the scanned images. Depending on the complexity of the material, I may get a crash anywhere from one in every 20 to one in 100 pages. Naturally, separate scanning and recognition slows the process down. On top of that, OP12 is very slow to start with, at least with "only" a 1.8GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM and all other applications closed. FR6 is distinctly faster and seems nearly bulletproof. Moreover, when accuracy of scanning counts, OP12 is next to useless for my purposes. That's because it is very weak on anything but straight text. Superscripts all look like quotation marks to it and subscripts all come out as commas. It is also very poor with any sort of special symbols or equations. Nor is there any way to correct these mistakes in the editing process -- you're forced to edit the PDFs with Adobe Acrobat, a very slow and laborious process. If you have material with as many superscripts, subscripts, and special symbols as the typical academic article, it is really faster to retype it than to try to do it with OP12. FR6, by contrast, gives reasonably good accuracy with such material and makes it easy to correct the mistakes that do crop up. In a surprising number of cases, OP12 will rotate the page so that the text is not upright and then proceed "recognize" it as garbage. FR6 is not altogether immune to this, but does it significantly less often. FR6 is sometimes wrong but never in doubt -- it has never reported being unable to complete OCR of a page, no matter how complex. OP12 is easily confused, especially when the page mixes text and tables, and then insists that you manually zone the page before it will proceed. Both programs offer an "auto-special" completely automatic mode that will do a decent job on simple material (assuming that OP12 doesn't crash in the middle). When you need to customize settings, however, FR6 offers more range of choices. It also offers more flexibility in correcting recognition errors and in manual zoning, should that be necessary. Surprisingly for a version 12, OP12 has a great many glitches, bugs, oddities, and time-wasting annoyances that make it seem more like an early beta. About 20% of the PDFs it produces are unreadable -- it's important always to check. The early FineReader versions were extremely rough, but FR6 is a very stable and finished product. As I say, OP12 is a good product and will no doubt serve many people well. If it comes free or at a very low price my advice would be to try it and see if it fills your needs. However, FR6 is more generally useful, faster, and trouble-free -- and significantly cheaper. Will O'Neil PS: I should remark that in the past I have complained of a few shortcomings in FR6 relating to scanning. I have now concluded that these were a result of scanner problems and/or some faulty settings on my part.
Rating:
Summary: As good as it gets
Review: I hate scanners. They're slow, cumbersome, and incredibly inefficient. I always end up with a document that's garbled and filled with incoherent symbols. Worse of all, I spend a ton of time proofreading and retyping words (sometimes complete paragraphs!) that for some reason or another got lost. Somehow OmniPage Pro 12 Office gets it right. Matched up against other scanning software, it's surprisingly accurate and features a lot of practical bells and whistles. My favorites: being able to convert spreadsheets into Excel files, edit PDF files, and scan two pages at once. Good stuff, definitely worth checking out.
Rating:
Summary: As good as it gets
Review: I hate scanners. They're slow, cumbersome, and incredibly inefficient. I always end up with a document that's garbled and filled with incoherent symbols. Worse of all, I spend a ton of time proofreading and retyping words (sometimes complete paragraphs!) that for some reason or another got lost. Somehow OmniPage Pro 12 Office gets it right. Matched up against other scanning software, it's surprisingly accurate and features a lot of practical bells and whistles. My favorites: being able to convert spreadsheets into Excel files, edit PDF files, and scan two pages at once. Good stuff, definitely worth checking out.
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