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[ Go to January 1997 Table of Contents ]
WinLab Reviews
-- by James E. Powell
The Visioneer PaperPort is the handiest scanner I've ever used, but its bundled software, once a leader, has become merely adequate as the competition has evolved. Visioneer's new PaperPort Deluxe Software 1.0 replaces that old suite and adds improved folder management, OCR accuracy and, at long last, search capabilities. With PaperPort Deluxe Software, you can manage scanned images the new five folder levels (for a total of 10,000 folders), with 200 items per folder, which you can color-code. Access folders via a hierarchical tree, just as in Windows Explorer. It's easy to drag and drop scanned documents into and between folders, and you can define default folder names and scan to a specific one. SimpleSearch indexes all documents, either on demand or in the background, after a user-definable period of inactivity, and it's remarkably accurate. After indexing, the program lets you hunt for words within the document's content, your annotations, or the title, comments, keywords and creator name that you assign to each document. Set the accuracy level and search your choice of all folders, current folders, or current and subfolders. The OCR capabilities have been improved with the ability to select a region of a scanned document and convert only selected region(s) to text-a terrific option for clipping a paragraph or two. Except for indexing, Deluxe is fast. Some new features, especially nested folders, correct deficiencies that Visioneer should have implemented long ago. However, at $79.95, this feels more like an overpriced upgrade than a new product.
Copyright © 1997 CMP Media Inc.
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