Entered CNET Catalog: 12/20/2003
SKU: 0780420105768
Manufacturer: Nuance Communications, Inc. (ScanSoft)
Manufacturer description
OmniPage Pro 14 Office is an extremely powerful productivity tool that delivers the most accurate and precise document conversion available today. Quickly turn PDF files and stacks of paper - letters, contracts, tables, manuals - into easily editable word processing and spreadsheet documents. Ideal for desktop, workgroup and enterprise use, OmniPage Pro 14 Office delivers everything you need to efficiently convert, edit, process, and share your paper and PDF documents. OmniPage Pro 14 Office will help your organization reach new levels of productivity by eliminating the manual reproduction of documents. Precision OCR technology, advanced layout analysis and powerful editing capabilities allow business professionals to quickly and cost effectively turn office documents into over 30 different PC application file formats for editing, searching and sharing with a single application. Custom workflow creation makes it easier than ever to handle large volumes of paper - helping to streamline the conversion process and complete your work faster than ever. Robust new tools enable you to print to PDF, turn text documents into audio books and add digital signatures to your electronic documents. Save time and money like never before using the world's most powerful document conversion application. OmniPage Pro 14 Office's new advanced automation and output features make the document conversion and archiving process faster, easier and more secure than ever before. Version 14 includes powerful automation and customization features, in addition to improved accuracy, allowing the software to be tailored to fit your exact business needs. Complete PDF functionality is at your fingertips with the addition of PDF print, encryption and signature capabilities to enable easier editing, archiving and sharing of documents, and the integration of the market leading voice control and audio output technology helps to boost productivity to new levels. Make the most of your limited time by working smarter with OmniPage Pro 14 Office.Product summary
The good: Accurate page recognition; powerful automation features; broad PDF support.
The bad: Some features, such as voice control, aren't well documented; features don't always work reliably.
The bottom line: OmniPage Pro 14.0 Office clearly remains the OCR app to beat, especially in office environments needing automated batch processing.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: Yes
- Reviewed on: 01/22/2004
Installing and configuring OmniPage Pro 14.0 is straightforward: insert the CD, and it runs automatically, presenting a standard menu. There are a few choices to make, and the program installs quickly.
You'll find the same clean interface in OmniPage Pro 14.0 Office as in recent versions. Below the menu and toolbar lines are four buttons with drop-down lists. These provide step-by-step or one-button control of the image capture and conversion process. You can choose to scan or use an existing file as the source. In addition to accepting a wide range of graphics file formats as the source, including TIFF, JPEG, and BMP, OmniPage also reads Adobe Acrobat PDF files, making it easy to extract text from a PDF document. If you choose to scan, OmniPage launches a scanner wizard the first time to identify your scanner and test its capabilities. This greatly simplifies configuring your hardware to use with the program.
The OmniPage user interface makes it easy to acquire documents and convert them to editable text documents in a variety of formats.
Once configuration is complete, the next step is to recognize the text in the document. OmniPage automatically identifies the different text, graphics, and table regions of documents and converts them to text as appropriate. In our tests, the program did a good job identifying regions as text, graphics, or tables, but you can also override the choices. It's extremely easy to select areas and define their type of content. For example, if OmniPage identifies the text within a graphic as text, you can instruct it to let it remain a graphic.
The final step is to save the converted document, and you can send the results to the clipboard, to e-mail, or to a file. The program supports a wide range of file formats, including Microsoft Word 2003 XML and most other Word formats, as well as five different types of PDF.
ScanSoft packs a number of new and enhanced features into OmniPage Pro 14.0 Office, each one valuable to the document conversion process. We tested OmniPage with various documents, and the recognition accuracy and formatting retention were noticeably better than those of its predecessor as well as those of Abbyy FineReader 7.0. In particular, a magazine page with two columns of text mortised around a circular image came out well in Word format and was nearly identical to the original. This was clearly better than the results obtained with FineReader.
Perhaps more important than accuracy are some of OmniPage's new features. Not only is its text-to-speech feature (for voice read-back) much improved, you can now use it to generate WAV files that you can record to an audio CD for later playback. It's like having your own electronic assistant to read aloud the latest sales report or research during your morning drive.
The Workflow Assistant guides you through the process of creating a work flow, which allows you to automate repeated OCR tasks.
You can even use speech recognition to launch saved work flows. In the proofreading window, for example, you can say "Ignore" or "Change" to accept suggested changes. Unfortunately, the speech recognition was a little unreliable on one of our test systems, and it had a hard time recognizing our commands. The good news is that OmniPage provides automatic support for both Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Microsoft Office 2003 speech-input features, so you can use those apps to command OmniPage. We tested it with Office's speech recognition, and it worked well.
OmniPage also sports new features designed to streamline large and repetitive OCR tasks. You can define custom work flows that will handle everything from finding an image file in a specific folder to e-mailing a converted document to a coworker. A new bar-code cover page feature lets you trigger a specific work-flow sequence automatically. All you have to do is place the printed bar-code page on top of the documents to be scanned, and OmniPage launches a predefined work-flow for the set of documents.
The package also includes ScanSoft's separate PDF Converter for Microsoft Word, which you can access directly from within Microsoft Office applications to convert PDFs into Word format.
The program's documentation--both in print and on disk--is generally lucid, with detailed illustrations and clear instructions. There are some holes, however, such as the lack of information about support for Office 2003 speech recognition.
Luckily, the company Web site makes it easy to check for program updates and search the support knowledge base. The site also provides lists of supported scanners and copies of the documentation available for download, and there are customer forums where users post messages about problems and solutions (though ScanSoft representatives do not participate).
ScanSoft's Web site offers tech-support features, such as user forums and an online knowledge base. Updates for OmniPage are also available on the site.
Technical support from a live person is a bit harder to get. You get one free call (although the call is not toll-free) when you purchase the product, but after that, ScanSoft charges $19.95 per incident for phone support and $9.95 per incident for e-mail support.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6out of 6 user reviews
I love this Software!
Pros: Its accurate, easy to use, and really simple. A great piece of software and a credit to the human race.
Cons: I can only use it 24 hours of each day.
out of 6 user reviews
Buy ABBYY it actually worked
Pros: I threw it out and no longer have to use it!
Cons: what help desk?, price, service
I am running OMNIPAGE 15 versus Abbyy 8.0. In my last test out of 123 converted from pdf to word pages abby had six errors. Omnipage pro 15 has 73. Omni Page would not let me return the product. I am going to purchase the Abbyy, my Abbyy trial period is running out.
out of 6 user reviews
Excellent character recognition but forces bulleted text on user.
Pros: Excellent character recognition which allows easy training for low quality documents.
Cons: If OCR recognizes text as bulleted form, there is no way to turn it off.
out of 6 user reviews
trial version
Pros: i don't know
Cons: I cannot get a trial version
out of 6 user reviews
Open Question
Pros: Don't know BUT I need help understanding how a document scanning system would work. What happens when I am scanning a docuemnt for OCR? It sounds like it takes time to digitize and process documents. Can I work on other projects on my computer as it s
Cons: Don't know
out of 6 user reviews
Doesn't work, unreliable customer support
Pros: This is referring to Omnipage Pro 14
Cons: one free problem solve, if you can get their reply mail to open after unsuccessful phone contact
