Amazon.com Product Description

OmniPage Pro 12 is a powerful productivity application that delivers accurate document conversion, turning PDF and paper letters, contracts, tables, and manuals into editable word processing and spreadsheet documents. Ideal for desktop, workgroup, and enterprise users, OmniPage Pro 12 delivers everything you need to convert, edit, process, and share your paper and PDF documents.

OmniPage Pro 12 saves you time by eliminating the need to manually reproduce documents and spreadsheets, delivering highly precise, editable results that can be used in your existing PC applications. It saves you money by replacing manual filing with electronic storage and retrieval. Best of all, it combines desktop ease-of-use with advanced XML, batch processing, PDF, and Open eBook capabilities, all within a single, affordable application. ... Read more

Reviews (10)

Greatest thing since sliced bread
As I am writing this review OmniPage Pro 12 is whirring away in the background.
I was just minding my own business trying to scan a hard copy report that was made form an 84 page spread sheet. All I got was vertical words. Then it happened; the system said if I wanted the real thing to buy an OmniPage Pro 12 upgrade. All that money for 84 pages? Then I thought of retyping all those pages and it was a no brainier.
I opened the package and started to read the manual. After about five minutes I just decided to take the plunge and put the CD in. five minutes later and the system had installed and checked out the scanner and chose the best approach to scanning to OCR. I used the OmniPage interface once and after playing around realized it was telling me how to use itself with a one-two-three step. Then I realized what the manual was saying and found that I could operate the process even easer from the Microsoft Word program. It works like a charm with no interference to any other process. The scan and OCR calculated that I was copying a table and created one that was appropriate. It even recognized that the page was placed in landscape. I have not tried Excel yet but if it works as well I could kick my self for not doing this earlier.
For those interested this is an XP system.

not clear it's worth the upgrade from 11
I like the new batch mechanism, which has an "output file per input file" option.I haven't particularly noticed a stability problem (Win2K SP4 + OP12 SP1/2).However, the deal with the PDFs is this: when OP12 reads an image PDF, it will only save such PDFs as grayscale (if you ask for image/image+text), and OP12 can only save grayscale/color PDFs at 150dpi.Hence, if you have bi-level input PDFs at >150dpi resolution, you get enormous, ugly 150dpi grayscale output PDFs.On the other hand, OP12 can handle high resolution TIFFs just fine (i.e., it will save them as image/image+text PDFs with the correct resolution).This makes absolutely no sense and is a big step backward from OP11.As the other reviewer notes, they appear not to have any intention of fixing this in OP12.

Omnipage Pro 12 Loves to Crash
Omnipage Pro 12 loves to crash. So much so, that it is impossible to batch convert a folder of files to Adobe Acrobat .pdf "image with text", which is the only really useful Adobe Acrobat format. Here we are in the year 2003, and software developers still haven't figured out how to gracefully exit their programs when the unexpected happens. Ominpage Pro 12 simply cannot deal with Adobe Acrobat .pdf formats well. Review the user groups on Scansoft's website, and you will see two major problems with its Acrobat compatibility. The first is when using Scansoft on an existing .pdf image file. Importing the .pdf file, capturing the text, and saving the file as .pdf "image with text" (which is supposed to save the ORIGINAL image with searchable background text) causes the image to degrade. Don't ask me why, but the image in the output file is not the same quality as the imported .pdf image. So to work around this issue, I started scanning our documents into .tif format (600x600) on our high speed scanner, and then importing the .tifs into Scansoft, for conversion to .pdf "image with text". The resulting .pdf files were graphically sharper than when I had imported existing .pdf files. The big problem is that running the Omnipage Pro 12 "Schedule OCR" on the folder of .tif files, Omnipage Pro 12 simply crashes at random places in the conversion process. No graceful exit. No warning. To summarize, Scansoft's Omnipage Pro 12 is inadequate to save files as .pdf "image with text". It crashes. And this happens on both a Windows 98 PC and a Windows 2000 PC, so it's not a PC-specific issue. Scansoft wants to charge you money to submit a problem form. Imagine, paying them to spend time addressing their own mistake! This is a bad way to conduct business.

Very Productive Tool ! It's killing Adobe too expensive ;-)
Don't hesitate Omnipage is excellent ! and you will save a lot of money compared to Adobe's products.

Useful but not as good as FineReader overall
I do a great deal of OCR in my research and have scanned thousands of pages each with OmniPage Pro 12 (OP12) and FineReader 6 (FR6). I have also made extensive use of previous versions of both programs. I am happy to have both, because they excel at different things. For my work, however, if I had to choose just one it would have to be FR6. Others might have different preferences depending on what they do and what their equipment and software are.

The bulk of my scanning/OCR involves academic articles and historical materials. For the most part I produce PDF files, although I also scan some tables to produce spreadsheets and do some scanning to Word files. Depending on the quality of the original and my precise purpose I may make a PDF with an image and hidden text, an OCR text file, or an OCR text file with images of uncertain words. I use an HP 7450 scanner connected to a Windows 2000 system with a 1.8 GHz P4 processor and 512 MB of RAM.

For my purposes, OP12's outstanding feature is the quality of its grayscale and color scans. In fact, I even sometimes use it to produce images for processing by FR6. Generally speaking, the PDF image files produced by OP12 seem to run about 80% smaller than those that FR6 produces for equal text quality -- and better rendition of photos! This is not true for black-and-white (1 bit) files, where FR6 seems to have a slight edge. But when the material calls for image output I usually click on OP12.

OCR is another story, for several reasons. First of all, when the going gets tough, OP12 quits in a huff. It will suddenly crash no warning whatever. This seems to be OCR-related, but if it happens while scanning the chances of recovering your already-scanned work are poor. For this reason, I always scan and recognize separately with OP12, since then the crashes usually do not corrupt the scanned images. Depending on the complexity of the material, I may get a crash anywhere from one in every 20 to one in 100 pages.

Naturally, separate scanning and recognition slows the process down. On top of that, OP12 is very slow to start with, at least with "only" a 1.8GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM and all other applications closed. When I need fast results or cannot tolerate crashes I use FR6, which is distinctly faster and seems nearly bulletproof.

Moreover, when accuracy of scanning counts, OP12 is next to useless for my purposes. That's because it is very weak on anything but straight text. Superscripts all look like quotation marks to it and subscripts all come out as commas. It is also very poor with any sort of special symbols or equations. Nor is there any way to correct these mistakes in the editing process -- you're forced to edit the PDFs with Adobe Acrobat, a very slow and laborious process. If you have material with as many superscripts, subscripts, and special symbols as the typical academic article, it is really faster to retype it than to try to do it with OP12. FR6, by contrast, gives reasonably good accuracy with such material and makes it easy to correct the mistakes that do crop up.

In a surprising number of cases, OP12 will rotate the page so that the text is not upright and then proceed "recognize" it as garbage. FR6 is not immune to this, but does it significantly less often.

FR6 is sometimes wrong but never in doubt -- it has never reported being unable to complete OCR of a page, no matter how complex. OP12 is easily confused, especially when the page mixes text and tables, and then insists that you manually zone the page before it will proceed.

Both programs offer an "auto-special" completely automatic mode that will do a decent job on simple material (assuming that OP12 doesn't crash in the middle). When you need to customize settings, however, FR6 offers more range of choices. It also offers more flexibility in correcting recognition errors and in manual zoning, should that be necessary.

Surprisingly for a version 12, OP12 has a great many glitches, bugs, oddities, and time-wasting annoyances that make it seem more like an early beta. About 20% of the PDFs it produces are unreadable -- it's important always to check. The early FineReader versions were extremely rough, but FR6 is a very stable and finished product.

As I say, I don't regret the money I've spent on either of them. However, FR6 is more generally useful, faster, and trouble-free -- and significantly cheaper. If the maker of FR6, ABBYY, would fix their scanning (something I've suggested to them several times) it would clearly be the preferable program. As things are, OP12 fills some needs better.

Will O'Neil ... Read more

Features

• Define procedures and services with minimal effort
• Define and monitor work order processes with maximum job efficiency
• Navigate through the different steps and track order activity quickly
• Perform flexible searches; pull up summary screens; print simple reports
• Automatically generates lists of items needed to complete orders

Features

• Includes Professor Answers - link directly to any topic
• Comprehensive Windows Training in a 5 Program Tutorial Set
• Covers Windows XP Home & Professional Editions
• Plus 23 Learning Topics on Home & Small Office Networking
• Digital Media Lessons covering 30 Learning Topics

Features

• Convert PDF files to Microsoft Word documents
• Eliminates the need to re-key and re-format PDF documents
• Accurately retains the layout of the original PDF file
• Open PDF files downloaded from the Web or received as e-mail attachments
• Does not edit encrypted PDFs

Reviews (14)

Great product to help save time
I have been using this product for a few weeks and it works great for me.When you consider what it does, the results are pretty amazing - it reconstructs a document with formatting from a picture!It does not work perfectly on every single document, but usually any clean up is minimal.I am very happy with it.For $50 it has saved me hundreds by not having to retype stuff from PDFs.I noticed someone made a comment about it not working on encrypted files - it says that one the box and on the web site.The stupidity of people never fails to amaze me!

PDF Converter with Potential
Having used this product on large (more than 500 pages) and complex documents, my conclusion is that this could be a very good product.Unfortunately, the software has some logic flaws that cause it to fail repeatedly on specfic text formatting.For example, consider the following listing:
a. Data Element
b. Data Element Tag
c. Element Number
d. Group Number
The application always fails on this and similar listings by randomly deleting the new paragraph marker and setting the right margin incorrectly.Too bad that Scansoft support, which could alert developers to this type of problem, is the worst I have ever encountered.Perhaps someone from Scansoft will read this review and fix this problem and other problems encountered by customers.

PDF Converter - Warning
This software only works on NON-ENCRYPTED pdf files.I paid too much money for something that did nothing for me.It read the pictures or scanned files, but not the text oddly enough.It was a waste of my money and my time to install and attempt to convert the file.I wish I would have checked to find out if it was encrypted or not.I might just end up selling it and hopefully get most of my money back.

Stumbles on Complex Documents
I downloaded this software to convert a two-page PDF document into an editable Word 2000 document. Much of the text converted well but the more complex areas of my PDF file, those that were contained inside of tables, were poorly done. Portions of it were rendered as images(!), while other parts came through properly as text inside of tables. However, much of that text was inside of frames, or even nested frames. Frames are Word objects that are tricky at best, and frustratingly hard to deal with at worst. Removing a frame often removes its contained text as well. Either way, editing the converted document so as to make it look like the original was very difficult. In the case of the portions that converted to images, it was impossible.
The product installs/uninstalls easily and seems to run well. If you're converting simple PDF files, this product may do the job but for complex documents, especially ones containing tables, I would not recommend it.

Those Dreaded PDFs
Yes, it converts pdf files to word.No, it does not do a perfect job if you have tables or graphics; and the formatting tends to get messed up.BUT...it sure beats retyping a multi-page document.

And those protected word files?I have found that if you make them pdf and then convert them back to Word with this program, you now have a document that you can edit. Yaaaah!!!! ... Read more

Features

• Print out informative business reports for your home or business
• Create personal and business-size checks, for printing or sending by email
• Design and organize your own estimates, invoices, and statements
• Create new drafts and checks by phone or fax
• Track and manage customer payments

Product Description

OmniPage Pro X Upgrade For Mac ... Read more

Reviews (8)

It works fine in OS X for me.
Just wanted to clear up some misinformation. I installed Omnipage Pro X in OS X 10.4 (Tiger). I did not need to use "Classic" to install it, nor to do any scanning. My scanner is a Canon LiDE 35, which has an OS X TWAIN driver. So everything is fully OS X compatible.

OmniPage 8 for OS 9 was easier and faster.
I installed OmniPage Pro X 10 upgrade for Macintosh on my new G4 PowerBook running OS 10.3 Panther. The installation went smoothly. I have used OmniPage Pro 8.01 for Macintosh for years, and found that it generally did a good job. I expected OmniPage Pro X 10 to be at least as good, but I found some problems.

ScanSoft claims that OmniPage Pro X works with all TWAIN compliant devices, and allows direct scanning into OmniPage, but it wouldn't do this from my Brother scanner. I have to use one of their "workarounds" by scanning pages into Apple's Image Capture (comes free with Mac OS X, and saves page scans as TIFF files), then load these images into OmniPage.

I find that both loading the TIFF file page scans, and scanning the text is much slower for OmniPage Pro X than for OmniPage Pro 8 - to the point of being annoying. ScanSoft claims that Pro X has much improved OCR accuracy, but my experience has been that if it is more accurate it is only moderately so. It still can't properly interpret font sizes, heading and indent formats.

A few other things were particularly annoying:

- Pro X throws up a dialog box requesting you to set Zoning Instructions for every page scan! When you are scanning dozens of pages this is a real time waster. Pro 8 never had this, and, given that my Zoning Instructions are always the same, it should be able to be turned off with a Preferences setting.

- Pro X does not automatically expand the Text View window to allow you to see all of the scanned text after it has been recognized like Pro 8 did. You must drag the window border, or slide window buttons back and forth, every time you want to look at what you just scanned. And there is this odd glitch that doesn't show the border being moved as you drag it - you must release the mouse button then the border shows where you just dragged it to.

- Command - + does not allow you to increase the scanned text size in the Text View window (so that you can read it) like Pro 8 did.

- ScanSoft free support allows only one call for one issue, then they cut you off and demand $20 for any other issue support thereafter - a bad policy for a company trying to market a complicated and awkward piece of software.

I have stopped using OmniPage Pro X 10. The solution I have settled on is to scan pages with Apple's Image Capture, and do OCR with OmniPage Pro 8.01 running under the OS X Classic environment. I just finished a long document, and this arrangement worked fine. OmniPage 8 has reasonably good character recognition accuracy.

Stay far away from OmniPage Pro X
The only reason I gave this product one star is because that's the lowest Amazon allows -- there is no "zero" stars option, and zero stars is what this product deserves. ScanSoft has ripped off the Mac community by NEVER fixing a snafu in their installer that will not work in MacOS X even though the product is touted as a MacOS X product. You MUST have the Classic envirenment installed. Those of us who have finally moved totally to MacOS X are screwed. As big as ScanSoft is, I thought they would have been more ethical than this. BIG MISTAKE. I've contacted them about this and their response in a nutshell: "Too bad, so sad."
I will NEVER purchase a ScanSoft product ever again.

Here's my payback: I'm an IS manager for a BIG company and we're in an upgrade cycle. Care to guess what Windows OCR software I WON'T be buying?

One other thing. Here's an opportunity for some lawyer to make some quick cash by bringing a class action against ScanSoft for selling a defective product.

A useful tool
This is not a well-supported product, as reviewers below have noted. But it is a useful tool and I do recommend it.

The major limitation is scanner support. You may be fortunate enough to own one of the handful of scanners that OmniPage supports directly, but really your best solution is a great product called Vuescan from Hamrick software, which supports over 300 different scanners (!); and which can save your scans to disk, which OmniPage can then import. Vuescan solved my scanner support problem - and I have an old little-sold scanner that is no longer manufactured; if it worked for me, chances are excellent that it will support your scanner as well.

For the rest of this review, I'll do a close comparison of OmniPage and ReadIris. I use both programs on a daily basis, and they are the top products in this category (I have evaluated a few other products but didn't find them worth using):

Speed: ReadIris is much faster, for me over twice as fast as OmniPage. This is not a real critical category; the OCR speed is only a small part of the time required for the overall process. Proofing and correcting is far more time-consuming (by a factor of 10) and requires real work, not just waiting for an OCR program to run in the background. The REAL speed issue with these programs is their accuracy - the more accurate they are, the less time required for proofing.

Stability: OmniPage wins here. ReadIris bombs on about 30% of its jobs, while OmniPage almost never does. I have never had a job which I eventually couldn't get ReadIris to process, but re-running jobs is nevertheless annoying.

Orientation correction: the accuracy of both programs deteriorates badly if the text isn't perfectly horizontal. While both can correct the orientation of a page, neither can correct the orientation of individual blocks of a page. If you have books, do the right and left pages separately (it is very had to get both pages in a book oriented exactly the same way) and your results will be much better. If you have pages with mixed orientation, I don't have any solution: get ready for real pain.

Zoning: the first step in recognition is to break the page into blocks of text or graphics (called zones). Both programs have automatic zoning, but for anything other than simple layouts, the automatic zoing is very imperfect and you may want to do it manually. Both programs desperately need drag selection to select multiple zones, but neither has it. Otherwise, OmniPage has a reasonable design, but ReadIris is more of a user torture test: tools are in a menu rather than a palette and you have to switch tools to select vs. draw (which you don't in OmniPage), so you have to switch tools often and you'll come to really hate that menu.

Formatting Accuracy: a nightmare for both - just forget it. I don't know why they bother trying; I think you'd have to be blind to accept either one. Use the software to grab the text, and then reformat it yourself. In order to do this, however, it is extremely desirable to preserve the line breaks rather than merge lines into paragraphs (which both programs can do and is extremely useful for text with little or no formatting). ReadIris lets you do this just the way you'd expect, but OmniPage has an irritating "feature" in that if you choose to save the text with line breaks you will find that the line breaks OmniPage saves are not the ones in the original document but different ones that it added itself: Arghh! A workaround I've found for OmniPage is to save it as PDF, then copy and paste the PDF text into an editor.

Text accuracy: this is what the game is really all about, but there is no clear winner here. Some pages are better handled by ReadIris, others by OmniPage. There are lots of small differences I've noticed, such as commas vs. periods: ReadIris tends to mistake periods for commas while OmniPage tends to mistake commas for periods. ReadIris does better with ambiguous letter shapes, while OmniPage does better with tables. I can't give an exhaustive list of the differences because in most cases I don't know why one program did better than the other. Both programs have a "learning" mode that is supposed to improve results, but I have not found either one useful. What OmniPage does have that is very useful is a "proof" mode, where it allows you to efficiently correct its output (and add to its dictionary) after scanning but before saving.

In conclusion, if you do significant OCR work, you will want both programs in your toolbox. The negative reviews of this program note some of its weak points, but it has proven an extremely useful tool for me - I continue to use both it and ReadIris (a useful method is to scan the same pages with both and then use a program like MS Word to compare them: this lets each program identify possible mistakes by the other). In my experience, the either-or approach implicit in those reviews is a mistake. Having OmniPage and ReadIris both has given me vastly better results than either of them would have provided by itself.

Thanks for the reviews
Just a quick thank-you to the others who have written. I was set to buy the upgrade, assuming that 'Pro X' meant OS X compatible. Thanks for saving me $130, and turning me on to Readiris - actual OS X software. ... Read more

Features

• Turn any document into a PDF file with the simple conversion tools
• Save your document structures and hyperlinks within the new documents by changing the settings
• Drag and drop your files into any file, PostScript or EPS file directly to PDF
• Protect your documents with password security
• High-end proofing and print production for enhanced color accuracy

Amazon.com Product Description

With Formulator, you can scan forms, complete them onscreen, and print the finished form in no time. Choose from printing your data onto the original, or print a copy of the form with your entries included. Formulator offers nothing short of precision printing within your original form layout. Boxed letters are no problem. Field positioning is freely adjustable and mouse controlled. You set field order and criteria. Best of all, automatic completion of data fields, such as date and time, makes the entire process a breeze. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

This program rock!
I wuv this program, very nice. Much better than Winforms and I am even member of company! Very nice, yes. Very nice.

Horrible Product
Horrible software program, however better than it's top competitor Zipform. Try getting THAT program to work. Good luck!! Error-mania.

Lousy Customer Service
This software was unable to operate with my system configuration and Global Village Inc., has refused to refund my monies even though the software was sent back to them. Don't buy this product. ... Read more

Product Description

Solid Converter PDF is integrated with Microsoft.

• You do NOT need Adobe® Acrobat® or Reader® to use this converter
• Solid Converter PDF can be used as a standalone converter tool or as a plugin for Microsoft Word® and Adobe® Acrobat® (not Reader)
• Solid Converter PDF is also available through Explorer's right click local menu
• A command line interface is available for batch processing

• Recovers vector and bitmap images
• Converts the entire PDF file at once, or, you can choose specific pages to be recovered
• Matches PDF fonts with Microsoft Windows® installed fonts
• Re-flows content from column to column, and page to page
• Replicates the PDF page layout including tables or forms with Exact reconstruction mode
• Retains Fonts and Paragraphs
• Allows user to choose a Plain Text option that drops layout and character level formatting to simplify the recovery of content and text flow recovery
• Allows user to extract all images, bitmap and vector, from a PDF file
• Converts vector graphics to embedded, editable vector objects
• Create PDF files from Microsoft Word

Amazon.com Product Description

FineReader Sprint 4.0 turns your scanned documents into editable electronic files in seconds. This versatile optical character recognition (OCR) scanning software features full-color OCR and full layout retention. FineReader seamlessly saves your documents to popular office programs such as Microsoft Excel, Word, and other Office 2000 applications, as well as in WordPerfect and WordPro formats. It retains page layout, including columns, tables, graphics, and fonts. And, if you've got a document that's less than ideal to begin with, no worries--you'll still get great results, and you'll never have to retype a document again.

FineReader Sprint 4.0 delivers over 99 percent accuracy. One-button scanning and recognition makes using the software a breeze. This program recognizes typographic text in 53 languages, ranging from Afrikaans to Ukrainian and every language in between. Save recognition results in text and Rich Text file formats. FineReader handily batch-processes images with great speed and identifies unrecognizable characters by bolding text. You can manually mark blocks as well as set scanner brightness and resolution. With full support for the Twain protocol, this program is compatible with just about every Twain-compliant scanner available. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

Careful with demo
The demo will not save your files but will not tell you why. It looks like the file is saved but it is not. The resulting Word documents, PDFs and HTML pages will be empty. It turns out that it is a limitation of the demo version, but the program does not bother to tell you. I think this is rude and misleading.

After a Quick Look
I received the standard version, but did not know the CD has two versions; the "Pro" version is included as a try/ buy demo, while the standard version is primitive. Text recognition is good, but preservation of the origninal layout is poor.I was dismayed when the scan result completely dropped a column of numbers on my first trial scan, and would not pick it up unless I manually blocked the column, but then everything else was dropped.I tried a scan combining text and graphics, and the result was very garbled.The resulting file transfered well into WordPerfect, but not into MS Word, as claimed.The "Pro" version did somewhat better, but not to my satisfaction.I need something else. This product is supposed to recognize characters of 53 languages (especially Russian), so for some people that may be the deciding feature.

The great OCR software
I think it is a best software on OCR market. It's easy-to-use, fast, multilingual. It has a lot of possibilities, works with cells, rotated texts, graphics and so. The try-and-buy version are aviable. Enjoy! ... Read more

Features

• Synchronizes with your PDA or conatct database - Pocket PC, Outlook, ACT!, Lotus Notes, GoldMine & more
• New OCR technology for rapid and accurate information taken straight from your business cards
• Intelligent business card processing with automatic orientation, deskewing & cropping
• Powerful contact database for archiving, searching, selecting and exporting your contacts
• Define which fields you want to print as a list, or as labels -- all popular label formats are supported

Reviews (1)

cardiris3
This operates pretty simply, but for the price I would have expected more features.The OCR is fair with only 10-15% of the cards populating the fields all correctly.
Major drawbacks are that cards with black color in them split into two cards.
No crop or straighten tool (the program claims to auto-straighten but does not work well)I fixed this by using an Avery (7600) clear 3 ring binder card holder page to keep the cards straight while scanning.This has helped a lot. ... Read more

Product Description

Adobe® Creative Suite Standard is a complete design environment that combines new, full-version upgrades of Adobe's leading professional tools. ... Read more

Features

• Cross-media publishing--create content for both print and the Web
• An integrated design environment featuring the industry's foremost design tools
• In-depth tips, expert tricks, and comprehensive design resources
• Intuitive file finding, smooth workflow, and common interface and toolset
• Single installer--control what you install and when you install it

Product Description

Home Inspection is designed for the professional home inspector who needs a solution that is fast, inexpensive, simple to install, easy to use and fully customizable. ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

OmniPage Pro X eliminates retyping, saving you time and streamlining document production. Create, convert, edit, and distribute digital documents with superior accuracy and improved formatting. Choose from a host of innovative capabilities, such as table recognition. Pro X also adds PDF functionality to extend the software's value beyond the paper world. Now you can convert PDFs into editable documents with a single click, or save paper documents as PDF files with similar ease. All of which adds up to increased productivity and efficiency. Plus, there's the added ease of working with a program built specifically for Mac OS X. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Don't waste your money
Doesn't seem to work under 10.3.
No patches from omnipage either.

Doesn't satisfy this long-time user
I've used Omnipage for years, going through almost all the versions since the first. When an upgrade appeared it consistently offered incremental improvements and I rarely had to even glance at the user's manual.

Not so with this version. In some key respects it is not apparent how it works even after consulting the manual. There are many more errors in text and formatting. Saves don't even go smoothly. I would guess that something that formerly took me 45 minutes now takes me several hours, including corrections. And I still don't know why the text selection doesn't flow from one page to the next in a multi-page document, as it used to. This product should have been put in the "leave well enough along category." ... Read more

Amazon.com Product Description

Use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other files on your handheld with Documents to Go. You can also open PDF files, e-mail and attachments, pictures and graphics, and Excel charts. Increase your productivity by creating and editing documents on the go, and work smarter by having instant access to contracts, price lists, forecasts, presentations files, PDF documents, and more.

Documents to Go Premium has all the applications you need in one package:

• Word to Go lets you create, view, and edit Word and other word processing file formats, including functions like tables, color, bullets, and numbering
• Sheet to Go makes it easy to create, view, and edit Excel and other spreadsheet file formats with support for over 110 Excel functions.
• Slideshow to Go lets you open, create, and edit PowerPoint files
• PDF to Go makes it easy to open PDF documents and manuals
• DataViz Mail allows you to open e-mail and attachments
• Pics to Go is an easy way to view all your favorite pictures and graphics
• Charting makes it easy to view, edit, and create Excel-like charts

Reviews (9)

THE BEST... DON'T WASTE TIME WITH ANY OHER PROGRAMS!!!!!!!!!
I am a middle school student using a Tungsten W. I use Word Perfect and Quattro Pro(Wish I had Word and Excel), and they work perfectly. Simply install it and it is self explanatory. The only complaint I have is that whenever I sync, my computer changes the font to Courier, although this might be just my computer (Dumb HP!!). I highly reccomend this program, or docs to go 7 if you have palm os 5. Thanks to DataViz, I can finish many homework assignments on the long bus ride home! You wont regret this buy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Best Excel Word Viewer For Palm I Have Ever Used!!!
This is by far the best Palm Excel / Word viewer I have ever used!I consider myself to be an intermediate/advanced PC user maintaining over 35 PCs... Take it from a stressed out Facility Manager, I do not have time or spare stress to mess around with junk software. A reviewer noted a problem with DTG not uploading data to his PC.Please note I only need this program as a viewer, and I do not make any changes to the file on the Palm.This potential problem aside, once I installed the program, and loaded my 15 sheet Excel program, I had navigation and all functions I needed mastered in two minutes WITHOUT THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL! >>TinySheet for Excel, which is a different program, bashing begins here>>.I have SUFFERED for more that a year with TinySheet.The Sync never worked correctly.I had to manually add the Excel document to the upload manager which crashed the computer after sync, reboot the PC, and it may work.To update the file I had to delete the file from upload manager, sync without it, and manually add it back in the upload manager to FORCE it to upload.TinySheet bad Documents to Go 5 Good!>>Mobile DB for Excel Bashing Begins Here>>.Since my job is about to double, I WAS (before discovering DTG) looking for something more reliable and less frustrating.I installed Mobile DB for Excel.It seemed to work, but it ONLY supports ONE sheet within Excel (I use 15 sheets), AND each file has to be manually saved as a CSV (comma separated) file which made this program a failure for my needs. I wasted $30.00 on that one... Mobile DB for Excel bad Documents to Go 5 Good! -Psalm 64, God Bless Our Troops!

Creating Documents and Printing from my Palm PDA
I use Docs To Go strictly for word processing, and version 5.0 is definitely an improvement.Typefaces can now be chosen on the PDA; and text is shown in the typeface selected -- which definitely goes a long way towards improving readability.There are also more formatting options (such as bullet points and paragraph indenting).Color is also available either in type or as a background.The net effect is to make document creation (rather than just document modification) a real Palm capability.

The new software works great in both my Palm m515 and Sony Clie. And on the Clie, with its higher resolution color screen, documents look even better.

The only negative I have is that the "go to start (or end) of the document" command has been deleted to make room for the formatting options.I don't miss it as much, however, on my Clie which has a scroll wheel for moving quickly up or down the page.

As an add-on, I also like to print from my Palm using BtPrint (available at iscomplete.net), which will output from Docs To Go 5.0, as well as from my Palm's calendar, address book, memo and to do list.BtPrint will transmit via either Bluetooth or infrared (IR) from my Palm, and in IR from my Clie.I dispatch wirelessly to any one of the Bluetooth or infrared printers I have in my home or office, (using HP's excellent and reliable 990, 995, 1315 and 450 models, to be precise).

As a watch-out, BtPrint will not work with the Palm 5.0 operating system, so printing from either the Tungsten T or Sony's newest units is not yet an option.

I am, overall, quite happy.I can now create presentation quality documents on my Palm when I'm at home or while traveling - without having to take my bulky laptop computer with me. And when I use the new Palm ultra-slim keyboard, with its sleek, high-tech styling -- I'm the envy of all that I survey.

I also recently discovered that Avery (labels) has made a Palm PDA label printing software available as a free download (at Avery.com) - which, like BtPrint, will output via Bluetooth or IR to the above same printers.I've used it - and it works great!

In conclusion, why use a laptop to create a document - when using a Palm PDA is so much more convenient?Docs To Go 5.0 is definitely the way to go!

Keeps getting better...
I started using Docs To Go at version 3 years ago on a IIIxe and I am now up to version 5 running on a Clie SJ-20. I'm a university professor and carry my Clie with me everywhere. With Docs To Go I can carry with me all the information about my courses and research. Most of the time I need it with me to keep it available in case I need to check something, but it also happens every day that I enter information on the Clie to especially Word and Excel files. I also love the feature of taking with me Powerpoint and PDF files. I tried QuickOffice but for me and my use Docs To Go wins on K.O.

Uno de los mejores softwares creados para la Palm
Antes de conocer este producto mi deseo era comprar una Computadora Portatil, el unico incoveniente era el precio y tamaño, ya que la necesitaba para llevar algunos apuntes importantes de la clase y para tener los e-mails, ademas de una agenda y directorio telefonico.Lo unico que necesitaba utilizar era un procesador de texto y algun programa que soportara mi imagenes (power point), baje la version demo del internet y es lo mejor que podido hacer para tener todos mi apuntes en orden, al mismo tiempo que puedo crear mis presentaciones estando en universidad y revisar mi correo electronico, al mismo tiempo que modificar cualquier documento y trabajarlos simultaneamente en la computadora y en la Palm, a diferencia de la competencia Pocket, todo lo que uno edita en la Palm, se edita en la computadora y visceversa...Pienso que es uno de los mejores software que han podido inventar si lo unico que uno quiere es un procesador de palabras y tener sus presentaciones con uno, sin mencionar los otros programas para ver las fotos de la familia y el excel... ... Read more

Reviews (6)

Version 8 requires product activation
This may be the best value in the world, but when companies are not up front about product activation, I consider them outright deceptive.As a software developer myself, I understand how companies want to try and address piracy; however, what am I suppose to do if this company ever goes out of business?I build my own PCs and change over systems every two years or so and need to reload all my programs...who knows where this company may end up next year or the year after that.If they go under and I need to reinstall, then what? I make it a point to NEVER by any software requiring product activation and I would not have bought this if I had known - at least it was cheap.Companies, you want your customers to be honest - why aren't you??At least be up front if you're going to require product activation so the consumer can make an informed purchase.

Thumbs up
I have been a user since version 5, and have used the software to visualize and build 2 properties to date.

Starting with a new one soon...

One of the better and value for money products.

Misleading information on the box
I have purchased the FloorPlan 3D version.It states on the box that it provides 1000 eitable floor plans in the soft ware.There are no instructions in the User guide to find these.The text support to speak to a person cost $9.95 per call.That is not mentioned on the box. On the box it states that there is a 30 day Money back guarentee. It does not state that it is a limited warranty for defective disks only.
I will be attempting to return this were I purchased it. Don't buy!

The best also compared with more expesive competitors.
I'm user of IMSI FloorPlan versions since v4 of this program. And however it has experimented many changes through this years, nothing compared with the excellences of this last version.
Obviously, as user, there are things that in my personal opinion could have been more developed or in other direction. Aswell as there are things that I still miss in such kind of programs (But it happens also with most of the competitors ones. And if any those ones have included such particular function or ability, those ones are just the most expensive ones).
Honestly, FloorPlan has evolutioned hand by hand to its users.

Sometimes non CAD or 3D Desing experienced users may find some difficulties to do their 1st. steps. But there is are free forums and now also excellent additional books that can show each one to create spectacular and amizing projects.The images contained will show you how powerfull FloorPlan v8 together with it's bundle CAD program TurboCAD is.

Long time user of FPlan
FPlan v8 has some of the best improvements of any version to date. In addition to new options for LightWorks Lighting and Materials the 8.2 update allows for below ground plane basements.

It is the only program I know of that allows for the use of imports from it's bundled Designer Cad program. You can use the hundreds of symbols included or make your own and import as 3ds files from Designer (a TurboCad light program).

Windows and Doors have unlimited sizing capablilites. UNLIMITED ! Any texture you wish to add can be done within the program. And VRML (virtual reality 'game like' walkthoughs) can be created with touch of a button, with textures included.

I've seen the advances in this program for over 4yrs. Any negative comment here are from inexperienced users. In addition IMSI provides a free Forum for users to post questions and examples of thier work.

I recommend the product to not only homeowners but remodeling contractors for creating both 3d Renderings and Working Drawings.

Their is no product better for the price !! ... Read more