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What's in the box: a Quick Start Guide, a 57 page User Guide (paperback), and a CD with the Going Paperless software plus another program: the Electronic Filing Cabinet. A scanner is not included in the box (but there is an option to use a digital camera). Word, Excel, and Adobe software are also not included (but see the Options paragraph below).
Registration: When I registered the software, I received a message that I was using an old version (version 12) of ReadIRIS, the OCR software. And I was offered the new version 14 of ReadIRIS for $79 (regular $129). There was no free update and I declined the $79 offer.
Installation: Loading the software is easy. I chose not to install the 50+ different languages. After the program was installed, your scanner may or may not be automatically detected. My Brother MFC-495 was not detected. So I followed the instructions, selected TWAIN, and then found my scanner in the TWAIN "Scanner Model" list. So I was good to go.
Use: The basic process is to place a document on your scanner, choose to scan to Word, Excel, or a PDF, and then your document will be scanned and opened in the Going Paperless Window with an option to save and open the document in Word, Excel, or your PDF software. Optical Character Recognition is performed when text is recognized. (You can also scan and save it as an image file. Going Paperless can also perform OCR on an existing image on your computer.)
Going Paperless document window: After an image is scanned (or an image file is opened) a representation of it will appear in the Going Paperless document window. You will see what the automatic page analysis has determined the sections or zones in your document to be: the border colors are orange for text, purple for images, pink for tables, green for barcodes, and blue for hand printed text zones. If your text was not converted, check to see if it was determined to be an image (purple). You can manually change a zone type (right click and select Window | Type) and then reprocess the document (click Process + Save).
Options: For anything other than a very basic text document, you may have to go into the options for improving on the results. There are options for manually defining the zones (text, images, tables, barcodes, hand-printed text (must be all caps), or zones to be ignored). There are options for formatting, resolution, language, character pitch, black and white, grayscale, or color, straighten the scan (Deskew) if it is tilted, automatic document feeder (ADF) or "interval" scanning for multi-page documents, generate bookmarks, etc. If you don't have Word and Excel, you can choose AbiWord, Adobe Reader, the clipboard, an HTML editor, Jarte, Lotus Symphony, Nvu, OpenOffice, StarOffice, WordPerfect, or WordPad (text frames and columns are not supported by Wordpad so a special page analysis and single column format is used). There is also an option to use a digital camera rather than a scanner.
Formats: Going Paperless supports the following formats: Adobe Acrobat (pdf), DCX fax (fcx), DjVu Images (djv, dcx), JPG (jpg, jpeg), JPEG 2000 (j2c, j2k, jp2), Portable Graphics Network (png), Compressed & multipage TIFF images, LZW, PackBits (tif, tiff), Windows Bitmap (bmp), and Zsoft Paintbrush images (pcx).
Support: Page 4 of the Users Guide gives a website and phone number for support. When I went to the website and tried to submit a support request I received an error message.
Performance: Conversion to text was fairly quick on my computer. It took just a few seconds to perform the OCR of a full page letter, but your mileage may vary. I scanned the back of the Going Paperless box into Word without changing any of the options. (See the pictures that I uploaded.) The following text was accurately loaded into Word (along with images):
v Easy To Use
Simple For Dummies program with easy, intuitive buttons and
directions for any person to go paperless.
v Efficient
With best-in-market technology made easy by For Dummies,
going paperless is a fast and easy process.
v Convenient
Save time, never have to search through piles of paper on the
kitchen table, office desk, or file cabinet again. Once
paperless, everything is immediately searchable and viewable
at the click of a button.
v Stress Free
Never worry about losing or accidently discarding a document again.
v Ideal Tools For
Bills, tax returns, contracts, warranties, letters, certificates,
bank papers, titles, insurance documents, recipes, report cards,
diploma, passport, official documents, mortgage, investments, and more.
My first test of scanning a table into Excel did not go well. I scanned a budget table with row and column headings and 5 columns of numbers (which had been printed landscape rather than portrait). What I received in Excel was the following garbage: "0 ~ (!) c (!) (f) >. After trying several different things I was able to get all of the headings and numbers scanned into Excel (when a gray-colored row was removed and the document was turned and scanned in portrait). All of the numbers and text headers were correct. However, for all of the cells with numbers Excel gave me a warning message that the number in the cell was formatted as text. So I had to select those cells (as a range) and then click the error message and select the convert to number option.
Scanning landscape documents: Doesn't work automatically for me. There is a scanner option for landscape but I couldn't tell that it really did anything. However for Word documents I was able to have success when I scanned the document and then clicked Process | Rotate clockwise, and then Process + Save. However the same procedure didn't work so well for tables I wanted to scan into Excel. Columns disappeared and some of the numbers were marked as text zones. I changed the text zones to table zones but they didn't get merged into a single table. And I couldn't save the result to Excel, only to Word.
Electronic Filing Cabinet Software: This program installs separately. There was no documentation and I chose not to install it. However the Dummies website states: "Contains all the pre-built folders you need in life! One click simplicity to save, file and retrieve all the documents that matter. Save statements, bills, receipts, warranties, email, agreements, and web articles . . . you now have a place to file everything!"
CONCLUSION: My initial round of tests showed that scanning basic portrait documents produced very accurate Optical Character Recognition of text and numbers. Text that is not level on the page and complex documents may produce some formatting challenges. OCR of scanned landscape documents were not processed well automatically. I was able to overcome the landscape issue for text documents but not for tables that I wanted to scan into Excel. I would give 4.5 stars for scanning basic documents that are portrait mode and maybe 3 stars for complex documents and landscape documents.
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