Paperless / PaperPort 14

Posted by Graham Rhind
Jan 18, 2013 at 03:07 PM

Thanks for the responses.

I’m surprised at how little we (on this forum) look at programs like Paperless and PaperPort (inasmuch as this is as much an information management software forum as an outliner software forum ...). Anyway, I’ve been doing some digging ...

PaperPort: (http://www.paperport.com) I’m using PaperPort 11 and it is now on version 14 (no version 13) but each iteration does not change markedly from the previous one. I use it mainly as a scanner front end, and though it can be slow and cumbersome, I’ve not had the negative experiences that many users report on various forums. I have, though, experienced Nuance’s aggressive sales tactics - in an online chat to ask if there are upgrade prices (there aren’t) I was kept on the line as they batted off the question and instead pushed and pushed for details such as my telephone number so that they could later telemarket to me ... the best way to get people not to buy, in my experience. It took 10 minutes to get the answer I could have had in 10 seconds.

The program most people seem to be switching to is Lucion FileCenter (http://www.lucion.com/filecenter-overview.html). Like most of its stable mates, FileCenter seems to me little more than a rejigged Windows Explorer with scanner connection and the ability to do some basic pdf manipulation, but with an eye-watering price tag. It’s rather dogmatic on the pdf front - it won’t even allow you to scan from an image to an image format - it all has to be pdf, which will stop me buying it. It also has very, very primitive tagging capabilities. It’s stable, has some great file previewing possibilities, but other than that ....

I also looked at eDoc Organizer (http://www.edocorganizer.com/) . It has a more realistic price and much better tagging, but it dumps all incoming files into a single “pile” and then allows filtering by tag to reduce numbers until you find the one you’re after. As I have 135000 files in my My Documents folder alone, inevitably it crashed. Like many of these programs, it would be great if it were installed and running before you started your working life and created any documents, but when you’re in your third decade of creating digital stuff, going back to retag everything could take an awfully long time, and many of these programs don’t have ways of making that a lot easier.

I’ll stick to PaperPort 11 for the time being and am looking at Tabbles (http://tabbles.net/) to see how that could help. It does, though, have an impractical interface and I fear I’ll be in my dotage before I get my files sorted out ...

Graham