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Converting all those stray papers on your desk to digital form is only the beginning of getting organized. Managing those scanned images along with your existing electronic documents is the bigger battle. Helping to bring order to the chaos is PaperPort Deluxe 7.0, the latest update to the document management stalwart from ScanSoft.

PaperPort Deluxe, which began life as a companion to Visioneer's sheetfed scanner line, has since evolved into a full-featured visual filing interface that can help you get papers off your desktop and into your PC. Priced at $60 ($30 for the upgrade), PaperPort Deluxe works with most any TWAIN-compatible scanner, although there are still several conveniences available only to owners of Visioneer's sheetfed scanners.

Visual In-Box

Getting your documents into PaperPort Deluxe is easy. After you enter the PaperPort Desktop--the main view that comes on screen when you open the program--a click of a button on the toolbar will invoke your scanner's native driver. You can make any adjustments to an image during the prescan stage, and then you can scan the page or image directly into the PaperPort software.

Scanned documents are immediately displayed as thumbnails on the PaperPort Desktop. You can then organize those thumbnails by dragging and dropping them into the nested folders to the left of the main screen; or, you can enlarge each image for viewing on screen and make adjustments and annotations as needed. Basic imaging tools for cropping, straightening, and fixing scans are integrated into this view. PaperPort Deluxe also includes tools for automatically generating rudimentary Web pages and filling in forms. And ScanSoft includes its TextBridge Classic OCR software for performing optical character recognition.

Alternatively, you can take a thumbnail and drag it to any of the application and operational links at the bottom of the PaperPort Desktop--for printing or faxing via Windows, for instance. PaperPort Deluxe will automatically recognize about 150 popular applications, and will provide shortcut links to those apps. You can also create your own links to applications that are not automatically recognized.

If you know exactly what you want to do with a page or image before scanning it, you can skip over PaperPort Deluxe's Desktop entirely and use the ScanDirect floating toolbar to scan items directly to a supported application.

Not Just for Scans

Existing electronic documents stored in your My Documents folder can be intermixed with the scans you make using PaperPort Deluxe. The program creates a full-text index of files and displays the files as thumbnails; you can click on the thumbnails to launch the documents in their native applications (Word documents open in Microsoft Word, for instance). In making a thumbnail, PaperPort Deluxe is merely creating a link to your original file, so you can move the thumbnail representation around within PaperPort's file-folder structure without affecting the original document. Alternatively, you can import specific documents into the PaperPort Desktop itself; such documents are stored as compressed .max files viewable only by PaperPort or PaperPort's self-executable MiniViewer, and any changes or annotations made to such documents will be separate from the document originals, which will continue to reside in their original folders on your hard disk.