What good is Paperport?

Posted by Hugh Pile
Oct 9, 2006 at 04:29 PM

I ought to say straight away that I don’t have Paperport. But I did monitor the yahoo Paperport group a year or two ago because I thought - in pursuit of the paperless office - I would purchase it. I wanted to put all my key paper documents on to disk and index them ( a key part of Paperport’s USP is that it creates searchable PDFs).

The yahoo discussion implied the then-current version, version 10, was something of a nightmare, with all sorts of serious problems, such that some people were even reverting to much earlier versions. The next version may have been better, but at the price I wasn’t going to take a chance.

I discovered that other similar programmes did exist, such as PaperMaster, but most seemed very expensive and/or even more poorly reviewed than Paperport. The technology ought to be improving - presumably the biggest software project in the world for the UK National Health Service has some elements of this, though maybe that’s a reason it’s in trouble. But I think the quest for the paperless office continues.