Rating: 
Summary: Spectacular Concept, Functional Software, needs some work
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Paperport, works great with a few minor problems
Review: I am upgrading from Pagis scanning software produced by the same company. I decided to upgrade to Paperport 8.0 last week (3/10/03) Right after I got my copy I saw on the Scansoft website that a new version is out already, 9.0. An upgrade is listed as $.... The program works fine. Seems a little less powerful in some of the editing and file manipulation abilities of pagis. It works better with Windows XP. One glitch, it cannot directly import my Pagis files with an *.XIF format! I have read that the new version (9.0) has a pagis importer built in. My overall comment: If you are upgrading from Pagis wait for version 9.0 to be widely available. So I now have to upgrade or buy the newer version to have XIF compatibility?
Rating: 
Summary: Came with my visioneer scanner & it was love at first sight!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Paperless home
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Literally a filing cabinet at your finger tips.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: High Marks for PaperPort Deluxe
Review: I have been using PaperPort, since 3.0 and I love it. I can't imagine anyone not doing the same. The program does it's job simply, cleaning up your desk quickly. I will up grade soon.
Rating: 
Summary: Poor Support and a product that does NOT RUN on Win2K
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: The BEST way to a "PAPERLESS" life! ... and more
Review: I have tried and tested various personal document management software programs to use with my scanner. PaperPort is the easiest and best! Some of the other products stopped trying to compete and they are no longer sold. PaperPort is a great file manager/viewer for all your work on your PC, but its real benefit comes with a scanner. Just scan your paper documents into PaperPort, then toss the paper (not legal documents of course), and touchup, or write notes on, or fill in forms, or fax, or email, or print, or do OCR into your word processor, or crop and beautify your photos, or ... etcetera. PaperPort is the BEST! It makes your scanner an essential tool in managing your paper-filled life.
Rating:
Summary: Manages to barely keep up, but the basic product is great
Review: I have used Paperport for years. It is an outstanding product with wonderful features. Version 8.0 Deluxe is the best yet and worth the upgrade. Unfortunately, in spite of some nice new features, there are some old things that don't work anymore or have been put in out of the way places so they are no longer readily accessable. In spite of that I am happy with the upgrade to 8.0 because of its improved robustness. As a new user, be aware that there are also certain bugs and usability problems that never get fixed. And occassionally they re-arrange the user interface for the worse. Why they can't put functions that I use a lot on the toolbars or allow customizable toolbars, I'll never know. There is a long list of suggested bug fixes and wish list features I sent them years ago, none of which have been addressed. They don't really seem to listen to the user community or to make changes other than to add "features" that they can use to sell new users or encourage upgrades (typical software company). That said, the core feature set is worth having. I consider it a necessary piece of software, in just the same way a Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Web Browser, Email reader are necessary. This is a Document Storage and Filing system. You can store scanned documents in PP. It has a builtin OCR engine. You can print documents to PP (ie. print a web page you want to always have offline into PP via a "dummy" printer). You can just drag a Word or Excel, etc document into PP. You can stack and unstack pages. Straighten scanned pages (others don't need it). And you can store photos (jpgs, gifs, tifs, etc). It also has some ok photo manipulation, cut and paste, crop, etc type of features.
Rating:
Summary: Manages to barely keep up, but the basic product is great
Review: I have used Paperport for years. It is an outstanding product with wonderful features. Version 8.0 Deluxe is the best yet and worth the upgrade. Unfortunately, in spite of some nice new features, there are some old things that don't work anymore or have been put in out of the way places so they are no longer readily accessable. In spite of that I am happy with the upgrade to 8.0 because of its improved robustness. As a new user, be aware that there are also certain bugs and usability problems that never get fixed. And occassionally they re-arrange the user interface for the worse. Why they can't put functions that I use a lot on the toolbars or allow customizable toolbars, I'll never know. There is a long list of suggested bug fixes and wish list features I sent them years ago, none of which have been addressed. They don't really seem to listen to the user community or to make changes other than to add "features" that they can use to sell new users or encourage upgrades (typical software company). That said, the core feature set is worth having. I consider it a necessary piece of software, in just the same way a Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Web Browser, Email reader are necessary. This is a Document Storage and Filing system. You can store scanned documents in PP. It has a builtin OCR engine. You can print documents to PP (ie. print a web page you want to always have offline into PP via a "dummy" printer). You can just drag a Word or Excel, etc document into PP. You can stack and unstack pages. Straighten scanned pages (others don't need it). And you can store photos (jpgs, gifs, tifs, etc). It also has some ok photo manipulation, cut and paste, crop, etc type of features.
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