Paper documents of all kinds clutter your business and personal life. Dominion Software’s WorkingPapers Pro 2.0 offers a solution: a centralized repository for scanned documents, faxes, and other scraps of information. WorkingPapers Pro lets you categorize, prioritize, and organize documents and find them later using keyword searches. Alas, its user interface is not as helpful as it could be.
Dominion sells WorkingPapers Pro exclusively as an online download that includes a nicely written user guide, online help, and a brief tutorial. You begin feeding documents into WorkingPapers by scanning, importing, or dragging and dropping them. WorkingPapers automatically creates a thumbnail picture of every page and prompts you for descriptive text. Any group of documents dropped onto the application’s icon gets archived as a batch into a single WorkingPapers file.
WorkingPapers displays an archive file in a window with a full-size view on the left and a scrolling list of icons on the right. You pick a page from the thumbnails list and can then edit the image and annotate it with Post-it-style notes, arrows, translucent highlighting, and even a voice message. You can ask WorkingPapers to run an OCR scan on a document to retrieve editable text, which you may use for subsequent searching. OCR accuracy isn’t critical, because WorkingPapers’ search function lets you control the “fuzziness” of the search. In addition to categorizing documents by keyword, you can organize them into hierarchical collections. Multiple users can share collections as well as individual archive files.
Although WorkingPapers offers excellent record-keeping skills, the program’s user interface has a few rough edges. You can’t resize the thumbnail area, which limits the number of thumbnails you can view at once. You also can’t view full-size documents side by side–a feature that most other applications designed for electronic document viewing support–or drag pages within an archive. And the absence of links to e-mail or fax applications makes it difficult to send documents to others.
WorkingPapers Pro 2.0 puts powerful organizational tools at your disposal, but it lacks some features of scanner-bundled products. For those whose scanner didn’t include such software, however, WorkingPapers is a worthwhile investment.
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November 1999 page: 74