I am looking to try to cut down on the ever-growing mountain of paperwork in our home office and want to use my wife's scanner/fax/copier to scan in some of the paperwork into PDF files. Does anyone have any suggestions on some decent OCR software that isn't going to cost me $300-400?

I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 running Vista Home Basic, 2 GB of RAM; the scanner is a HP LaserJet 3050 and I am running Open Office, so no Microsoft Office Document Imaging software installed. (The scanner/fax/copier was provided by my wife's company and all the necessary software was already installed on her laptop, and I don't want to scan our personal stuff into her work laptop.)

Any help anyone can offer is appreciated.

You could try the Windows port of GOCR

I've used the OmniPage s/w that's a throw-in with scanners through the years.

A few months ago, I bought a Canon MX300 ink-jet copier/flip-top scanner/fax, with the OCR throw-in. It was something like 70 bucks.

I don't use OCR much these days(OmniPage SE 4 came with that Canon), so I haven't really familiarized myself with it. But the previous versions I used worked well enough. BTW, that units' scanner s/w is quite easy to use (MP Navigator EX 1.0)

I keep seeing references to OmniPage but I haven't found a cheap one - I keep finding the Pro version, which is like $400-500 and I just can't spend that. I might have to look at other avenues for procuring this.

Well, for 70 bucks or so, you get OmniPage SE with a printer/flatbed scanner/fax/copier thrown in!

Thanks, but already having two printers - one basic desktop laser printer and one good-sized printer/fax/copier - the wife would not look too kindly on bringing another piece of technology into the home...

I think I'll check eBay, and if no luck there I might have to look at some of those "unscrupulous" sites...

I connected to the all-in-one and tried scanning something, and it turns out there is a rudimentary OCR/scan program installed but it scans into the Windows Photo Gallery as a TIF format. It also presents everything horizontally, not vertically, and I can't find an option to rotate the image before printing as a PDF.

I did find a few OmniPage 14 and 15 versions on eBay for between $5 - $20, so I think I am going to check those out.

If you've already got OCR software with another scanner can't you just use that?

No, the only scanner we have is the scanner/copier/printer provided by my wife's company for her home office. The OCR software they provided came preloaded on her work-provided laptop, and I don't think it's anything special, I believe it's just the Microsoft Document Imaging that comes with Office.

Not only is her laptop on lockdown from her IT department (most of the software she uses is virtual office stuff, she can't use USB flash drives, can't save documents to her documents folder, can't burn CD's or DVD's, nothing) I wouldn't feel comfortable scanning personal stuff into her work laptop and trying to transfer it to another computer.

So her IT dept knows what they're doing. Good to hear. I used to love it when the summer interns would call up with an issue, and we'd look at their system and see things like AOL Instant Messanger, and MP3 player programs. Delete, and report them to their boss for using "unauthorized applications during working hours".

Yes and no. They were a little overzealous at first - they locked out everything, even managed to somehow lock her out of wireless internet access and prevented her computer from logging onto their secure sites -- and when we called to talk with them about the problems they had us send the laptop back to the home office in Atlanta a couple times and had a couple conference calls before we got everything figured out, installed and up & running.

It's not like I don't understand the reasoning for it. They pay for our internet access and she works with her clients' sensitive personal information, so they have to be extremely careful. Besides, she doesn't really do anything on her computer but her work - no internet surfing, no streaming music, nothing but uses the office programs.

It was funny, though - she had an issue the other day with one of the programs and had to download an IE update to continue, but the IT security prevented her from doing so. So she had to call IT and they did a remote connection to authorize the download, and they started giving her crap about an unauthorized program they found on there. Took her five minutes of repeated explanations that "you guys locked me out of downloading and/or installing anything, I have to call you to do a simple update - how the heck could I have downloaded this program?" before they realized that she couldn't have installed the unknown program.

Success! (Somewhat.) Last year I got this free set of small business software from Microsoft, including Small Business Server 2003 and a couple others, but when I got the pack there wasn't much I could use. It included Outlook 2003, which I installed this week to basically keep my contacts in order for my aging PDA, and when I installed it the software included the Microsoft Office Document Imaging and MS Office Document Scanning programs, and the quality is night and day better than the generic "Scan" program that was already installed. This will work for now and saves me from dropping any cash on a new program. Now comes the fun part - tackling the mountain of paperwork that needs to be scanned, shredded, discarded, etc...

Microsoft to the rescue!



FWIW, when I scan sensitive documents with personal info, I make sure that my internet connection is severed, and that up-to-date AV and spyware programs have been run.

Yeah, who would have thought I'd be applauding MS for once.