ScanSoft PaperPort 11 Professional Review

3 Different Review

Review 1

This is the first time I have been so dissatisfied with a product, and a company, that I have taken the time to write a review to warn others away. I bought PaperPort 11 Pro packaged with OminPage Pro 15 on a 15 day "free" trial. The price was for a package of PaperPort Pro 11 with OminiPage Pro 15 packaged with it for "free." I emphasize "free" because Nuance billed my account and collected their money for the PaperPort the day after I placed my order. I suppose I should have been alarmed by the haste with which they grabbed the money. Reminiscent of a snake oil salesman who has just sold you a guaranteed miracle cure, grabs your money, and then gets out of town before you find out that you will be lucky if the cure doesn't kill you. Nonetheless, I soldiered on. After days of constant lockups and crashes (and not on a low end PC run by an idiot) you can well imagine how delighted I was to get an email from Nuance telling me that they were preparing to relieve my bank account of nearly three times the price of the PaperPort for the "free" OmniPage Pro 15. Amazon review Guidelines say I shouldn't mention the specific price. I suppose I can say that you had better watch out on any pricing scheme Nuance my throw out as a lure. Trust me, you are seeing the bait, not the hook. It is not that I didn't read the offer carefully, I'm an attorney. Read the other reviews and ask yourself -- even if the software was the best in the world, do you really want to trust yourself to a company that can enable even the illiterate to understand Caveat Emptor?

Review 2

If you want to manage both scanned and electronic documents, there is really no alternative to PaperPort. And that's too bad, because this flawed product just goes on and on with little or no improvement.

What flaws? The major one is that the program has two completely separate modes of operation, organize or view. The thumbnails are too small to read, so you can't label the document until you switch to the view mode to see what it is. Then, you have to go back to organize mode in order to apply the label, key words, what have you.

The next flaw is really a bug, but one that PaperPort perpetuates release after release. normally, you would want to sort your view of thumbnails by date, with the most recent ones on top. PaperPort pretends it can sort this way, but in fact when it indexes, it destroys the file dates of every file, rendering sort-by-date useless.

And this is emblematic of the company's attitude, which seems to be "too bad." As others have stated here, support is horrible and actually worse than no support at all. It is outsourced to India or the Philippines or somewhere, and those people know less about the product than you or I do. And you pay for it.

But getting back to my title, there really is no alternative. PaperPort is a perfect example of what happens when market forces are not at work. No one else competes in this space, so Nuance (I love that name) has no reason to improve it, other than to bring out meaningless expensive upgrades on some kind of schedule.

So if you have to organize your documents, this is all you have.

Review 3

I have been using Paperport for years. Each upgrade has added nice new features but also bugs. But the bugs were minor and I could live with them.

Recently I received several ads in the mail and an email from Nuance to upgrade from v10 to 11. Ad sounded great and the price $99 was reasonable. So I figured "what the heck." Clicked on the email link to upgrade and takes me to a non-existing website. Typed in the website link from the mail ad, again, no website. Probably should have clued me in, but I went against my best judgement and called Nuance to buy the download.

Installed the product. Registration didn't work smoothly but wasn't a big deal. Then I tried to scan a document. I checked the "Capture Assistant" box and clicked scan. Scanner does its thing then at the end of the first page, I get the famous Windows XP error box to report error to Microsoft. So I rebooted and tried again, without the Capture Assistant. Scanned my document OK this time. Sounds good, right?

Wrong. I have an automatic document feeder (ADF) which allows me to scan both sides of a document (at least in previous versions of Paperort). Wtih v11, I can only scan both sides automatically if I use Capture Assitant. Except whenever I use it, it crashes. Now I cannot take advantage of my ADF and have to scan 2-sided docuements page by page manually! That would be fine for a couple of pages but a nightmare for a 10-page (20-sides) docuemnt. So I should contact customer support for help, right?

Wrong again. You have to pay for support. That would be fine it I'm don't know how to use the product and need a little guidance. But I should not have to pay to report software crashes. And what if I pay for help and they can't help me? Do I get my money back?

I sincerely hope an update soon will fix my problem. But I doubt it will happen since very few people will pay to let Nuance know about these issues. And if they don't know about the bugs, they are unlikely going to fix them. Soon I will likely attempt to take advantage of my "30-day money back guarantee". Probably have to pay a fee for that too!