Rating: 
Summary: PaperPort 9.0 unable to hyperlink MAX files from MS Office
Review: I was very excited to get this product. It scans well, files well, is very sexy and promising. Then I decided to Search for a few files based on my Keywords. Oooops! It won't search!!
If you don't know already, PaperPort offers you only one free tech support call. After that it's $20 a pop. The rather surly technician I reached had me re-install my program. Okay, but it still wouldn't search. Then he told me to un-install Windows Service Pack 2. Uh uh, no way. Nada. That's when I asked for a refund.
I bought MyCab for $40. Tech support is marvelous, within one hour over the Internet. The only thing it doesn't do is scan within the program, but then I can do that, can't I?
AK
Napa, CA
Rating: 
Summary: Good Program with Some Problems
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Feature-rich and very useful
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The best Document Management software I found.
Review: Very reliable, a lot of features and very easy to use.
Don't listen to the naysayers...read the professonal and specialized reviews instead... http://www.scansoft.com/paperport/reviews/
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