PaperPort Professional 12 Document Management Software

PaperPort 12 Professional is a top-end suite of software that allows you to easily create PDFs (and make regular PDFs into fillable forms) that can be searched and password-protected. It also makes organizing scanned documents across a network a much simpler task, and even connects directly to Sharepoint. It's a bit complicated to use and more expensive than, say, a full-blown version of Adobe Acrobat, but the range of options it offers might be worth the extra money to business users.

Document scanners and all-in-one printers typically come with some kind of software suite to enable you to scan and organize documents. In most cases this software is fairly rudimentary, and rightly so; for most home users, organizing digital files is not an overwhelming task. But for businesses with multiple users creating documents regularly, the task is much more complex, and requires a more robust software solution--preferably one that is easy to configure for multiple users and devices.

Enter PaperPort Professional 12, a software suite from Nuance that makes it easy to organize documents and files from different users across the network. It includes a host of benefits that can make businesses run a bit more smoothly as well.

For example, if you ever need a fillable form created from a paper form (or from a non-fillable Adobe Acrobat file), PaperPort 12 can help. It "recognizes" the locations where data can be entered and automatically converts them into fillable fields. The process wasn't perfect (although not surprisingly it worked perfectly with the test PDF provided with the review kit), but any incorrect or missing fields were easily and quickly corrected.

At the heart of the software is optical character recognition (OCR) that turns text from an image or PDF into plain text that can be edited. The better the OCR, the less correction work you'll have to do on the results. PaperPort's OCR worked quite well and I was impressed with the way it was able to smoothly convert PDFs to Word documents. Again, it wasn't flawless, but it was very good. One benefit of this is that it allows you to take a picture of a document and turn the resulting image into editable text, even if your original image was off center (the image is automatically deskewed).

Nuance says that the software will work automatically with any desktop scanner, and I found this to be the case with only a single exception, a portable scanner that remained invisible to the software. It was easy to get the programs working with all other scanners I tested.

I found the software not as intuitive as I expected it to be, but after using it for a few hours it made more sense; perhaps a bit more instruction information in the box would be helpful. However, the 'How To' guides in the program walk users through the most commonly used features. The PaperPort software doesn't come cheap--the Professional version is about $175--but home users who don't need all this functionality can certainly rely on the cheaper versions of the software. For business users, it's certainly worth a try--and the extra money.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.