Web Price:  $50 plus shipping.

Scansoft, Inc.,                9 Centennial Drive, Peabody, MA  01960. 888-345-6203

Support:

www.scansoft.com  Free email support on web site. Free phone support for installation issues at 978-977-9713 Other phone support at $14.95 per incident.

PaperPort Deluxe 7

By Bart Koslow, Los Angeles Computer Society

 PaperPort is the complete solution, using your scanner or camera, to manage documents, photos, URLs and Web pages. You may use it for scanning, copying, filing, sending (by email or fax) and finding paper (which has been converted to a file). I have used this program for some time and find it invaluable. PaperPort comes with a small manual, which I never opened until I began to write this review. That is how easy it is to use.

The program supports most scanners and cameras including all twain supported cameras and scanners. The installation program went smoothly with PaperPort easily finding my scanner and installing it. Links were created to all of the programs on my computer. The links show on a link bar at the bottom of the PaperPort screen. Once you have an image on the PaperPort desktop, you may drag and drop it onto the program icon link to perform a function. For example, drop the image on the WinFax icon and WinFax will start and send the image. If you drop an image containing text onto the Outlook icon, the internal PaperPort OCR program will convert it to text and place the text into an email message in Outlook. Make copies by scanning and dropping the image onto your printer icon. All images are compressed in the PaperPort format to maximize space usage. Using the Scan Direct control panel, you can scan a document and send it directly to a linked program without starting PaperPort. Images may be enlarged or made smaller for viewing. They may be annotated with the built in annotation tools. Pictures can edited and adjusted using the Image Editing tools. Scan a form and use the FormTyper to complete it. You may view non-PaperPort items from PaperPort using the program that created it or you may copy the item into a PaperPort format.

 The PaperPort desktop provides an Explorer like filing and management system to organize your desktop files and folders. In fact, you may use Explorer for this purpose interchangeably with PaperPort. There is a simple search function, which will index all of the files on your PaperPort desktop. You may then use the PaperPort find function to locate an item or file by keywords, the simple search index (faster), URL, title, annotations, etc. If you install BookMark Express as part of the installation, you will add a set of tools to capture, view, and manage web sites in PaperPort and in your browser. A "My Bookmarks" folder is added to the PaperPort folder view that automatically synchronizes with the "Favorites" in Internet Explorer or "Bookmarks" in Netscape Navigator. Using the Web Capture command now in the Favorites or Bookmarks menu of your browser, you may add Web pages to the desktop view, and automatically update them each time you connect to the Internet. For example, if the Web page contains a price list, it will automatically be updated each time you capture the Web pages for the bookmark selected.

If you have a computer, you should have a scanner (They are so inexpensive). If you have a scanner, you should have a program like PaperPort to obtain the maximum utility using your scanner. I can think of no better program than Scansoft's PaperPort for this purpose, unless it is another comparable program from ScanSoft like Pagis Pro.