| | |  | File Compression & Decompression | Home » » » » Omnipage 18.0 | | | | | | | Description: | | Omnipage 18.0 | | | Features: | |
• Improved OCR engines deliver superior accuracy for document conversion and archiving business critical documents
• Convert documents stored in Windows Live SkyDrive, GoogleDocs, Evernote, Dropbox, and many more
• Includes the Nuance Cloud Connector powered by Gladinet
• Capture text with a digital camera or iPhone
• Scan a document, automatically convert into a readable format and send it to the Kindle electronic book reader in one easy step
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 1.5 inches | | Product Width:
| 5.0 inches | | Product Height:
| 7.5 inches | | Package Length:
| 7.6 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.1 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.1 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.02 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 43 reviews |
| | | System Requirements: | | | Platform:
| Windows 2000 | | Media:
| DVD-ROM | | Item Quantity:
| 1 |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 43 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
40 of 41 found the following review helpful:
 Only For a Select Few... [2.5 Stars]Oct 26, 2011
By T. Adlam
"professional consumer"
To start, it bears mentioning that I'm a previous Nuance (Dragon Naturally Speaking) customer, so I had no delusions about the company before selecting OmniPage 18. If you aren't a customer, then you should be aware that: 1) Their customer service is sketchy at best; 2) They'll nickel and dime you six ways from Sunday; and 3) If you give them your email address, they'll send you every Nuance-related marketing e-bumf from here to the end of time. With that said, after months of using OmniPage 18, here are my thoughts:
I have three operating systems across all of my computers: Windows XP, Vista, and 7, each with system requirements exceeding the minimum required for OmniPage. My goal was to try the software across each one, however, after dealing with the headache that was installation on the XP machine, I reconsidered. The autorun refused to automatically run, so I launched the set up file manually. After the software offered me a successful installation message, I launched it only to be greeted by a cryptic error message moments before the program crashed and closed. Rather than quit, I tried my hand at troubleshooting and discovered the problem--and it wasn't pretty. (At this point, I will note that Windows XP users should simply avoid this software, especially the technophobes.)
Once I had the software up and running, I gave the graphic user interface (GUI) a once over. It seemed rather simple and intuitive, but I quickly learned its appearance was deceptive if you intended to do more than a simple OCR conversion. (And by "simple OCR conversion" I mean clean black text on white background without images--usually of the kind originally created in word processing programs.) If you intend to use the extended features--for instance, a picture from your camera, or converting from a scanned book or a scanned document with an other-than-super-bright-white background--the trouble starts.
What's worse is that the help documentation goes so far as to be thoroughly unhelpful, possibly detrimental. One needs a healthy amount of patience, an inquisitive spirit without aversion to experimenting with software settings (which is why I told the technophobes to run away), and a pen and paper with which to create one's own help documentation as one discovers through trial and error how to complete certain tasks. (At this point, if this doesn't sound appealing to you and you need more than basic OCR conversions done on the default settings, then you'll want to rethink this software.)
The range of features this software touts is impressive and I wanted to test as many as I could before writing my review. I started with a PDF document that I originally typed in Microsoft Word. It was a plain document with plain Times New Roman text, no images, or tables--the fanciest it got was a header and a footer. OmniPage 18 converted this document into Word format beautifully, even with the header and footers intact and completely editable. Next was to try out a slightly more complicated PDF document conversion and I have to say, it passed, even where the tables were concerned. The only quibble was with the image positioning. At that point I thought maybe the software would be worth all the headaches to get it up and running. Then I moved on to converting *other* types of documents.
I printed a page on bright white copy paper from my first document and snapped a picture with my iPhone camera. I made sure the area was well-lit and the document was properly positioned in the iPhone screen. (Basically, I made sure I used optimal conditions, which is probably beyond what the average user might do, so bear that in mind.) The resultant document was vastly different from my first experience. About 30% of the converted text had errors and the corrections offered seemed completely random.
Next I worked on converting images I scanned directly from some books. OmniPage had a nice feature which allowed the automatic detection of the divider between two pages and that worked fairly well (that is, of course, if you can find it to use it). However, the book I scanned had slightly discolored pages and the margin of error for OmniPage went up considerably.
With the increased number of errors, the more interaction with the proofreading editor I had. That proofreading editor is not user-friendly or intuitive--at least not beyond the basic corrections. And finding a productive workflow is nearly impossible because many of the features that you'll need require multiple mouse clicks to access and then process. And Heaven forbid you actually make a mistake while doing the proofreading and need to go back because that will open up a whole new can of worms.
Even the files into which you can save your documents are unintuitive, because each one (even the same formats) vary slightly from one another, and there isn't any proper documentation as to the differences in each.
(By the way, the ebook format into which this program exports is completely horrid. Tip: export into HTML, clean it up in a different program, and then convert it using Calibre.)
However, the program does have a few redeeming qualities (hence the 2.5 stars instead of 1). It's clunky, sometimes unintuitive, borderline backwards, but once you get beyond this and find your groove, it has a few nifty features--the key is finding them.
So, to close...
For whom is this software? People who only need to do simple OCR conversions, or people who don't mind getting their hands messy when it comes to technical troubleshooting, people who have the patience of saints, and those who don't mind compiling their own documentation as they go along. Everyone else should probably look for something else.
I hope you found this review helpful and if you have any questions about the software or my experience with it, leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer.
30 of 32 found the following review helpful:
 Great at reading data from tables!Jun 26, 2011
By N. Krumpe
Before getting Omnipage 18, I read reviews of previous versions of the software. Reviewers were very critical of the difficulties in getting started with older versions (17 and earlier). So, I was nervous that the new version would be just as difficult.
I am happy to report that I found Omnipage 18's automated "Workflow" options to be extremely easy to use, and I've now used it to take care of a task that I've been dreading for months: Processing tables of data that I have on printed pages...
I have ten years worth of paper documents that contain a combination of text and numeric data (mostly the latter) stored in tables. I need to do some statistical computations on this data, but I don't have access to the original files. I was beginning to think that my only solution was to manually enter the data into Excel. Well, it turns out that Omnipage 18 has a mode that will automatically import scanned data into an Excel document, putting each scanned page into a separate "sheet" in the document. This is exactly what I needed. So, I used my scanner at work to quickly scan in 30 pages as a pdf, and then opened the document with Omnipage. Conversion was almost instantaneous, and the numeric data itself seems to have been recognized flawlessly! When I began skimming through the data for the first couple imported pages, I was just so relieved to see how perfectly this was imported. Now, I can use Excel to perform the calculations I need. Omnipage 18 has saved me hours of work on this task. I've never used those older versions of Omnipage, but this one has been extremely easy to use. (And, for those concerned, I went with pdf format just because that was easy for me with my work scanner. Omnipage can take data from many other sources, including scanners, cameras, and more.)
One other scenario where Omnipage has proven its value: My wife had several pages of family reunion address data on paper, again stored in tables. I scanned it in and tried to use Google Doc's automatic OCR features by uploading the document online. It did a lousy job, and so the scanned image sat on my computer untouched for a month. Finally, I opened the same document in Omnipage 18, and imported it as a tabular Word document. I was done after just a couple minutes of checking over the few spots where Omnipage had trouble with the recognition.
So, why four stars instead of five? Two reasons:
1) Sparse documentation. The box contained nothing but the disc. The help menu is not very well organized, at least for my needs. In the two examples above, I didn't need the documentation because everything worked so smoothly. But when I tried working with a not-so-easy document (a webcam photo of a recipe from a cookbook), I really needed to read the documentation to figure out how to deal with some of the trickier parts of the scan (tricky because the photo I took was sloppy). I fumbled around for quite a bit before I found what I needed. Within the Help menu, I found "The Text Editor" and "Customizing Zones" sections to be particularly helpful in learning how Omnipage handles converting images to text. I just wish that the information were easier to find.
2) The unnecessary "Nuance Cloud Connector". I guess, in an effort to show that the company is on the "cutting edge" of technology, they have provided an additional piece of software for staying connected to various "clouds" such as Google Storage, Amazon S3, WebDAV, and more. I am already as cloud-connected as I want to be (Dropbox is already meeting my needs), so I didn't appreciate Nuance kind of coercing me into installing this add-on feature that runs every time my computer starts up. It wasn't obvious to me whether I could skip the installation of the Cloud Connector software. So I installed it, confirmed that it was not going to help me in my day-to-day workflow, and then used Windows Control Panel to uninstall it. I'm glad to find that Omnipage 18 seems to run just fine without the Cloud Connector.
All in all, I'm very happy so far with what Omnipage 18 has done for me, and expect it will continue to come in handy!
12 of 12 found the following review helpful:
 Tech support gave up on meJul 22, 2011
By T2000KW
I purchased the PRO version of this product (not this version, though it appears that the same scanner setup wizard is also in this version of the product) and installed it on my PC. It continually sent me through the scanner setup wizard and supposedly let me save the scanner setup after testing it successfully, then when I went to scan something, it didn't recognize the scanner it said worked fine and saved.
Tech support responded after a day or two then, after spending a fair amount of time editing an ini file somewhere so that I could enable error logging, followed by sending the requested files in, hey never responded back. after a little over a week later I got my refund for the software and gave up on it.
Omnipage also trashed my Paperport 12.1 installation and I had to go back and reinstall that also. Now, when I start Paperport sometimes, it wants me to activate it again. I try the automatic activation and that doesn't work. Once the manual reactivation worked but now it doesn't.
I have Omnipage 15 standard and it works well for me, so that's what I'll continue using. Apparently, Omnipage 18 still has some serious bugs to work out in the scanner setup portion of their product.
10 of 10 found the following review helpful:
Do Yourself a Favor.......Sep 30, 2011
By Stephen J. Britt
"sjb"
Do yourself a favor. Avoid this product. I spent $ 112.00 on this junk with a view to finding a product that would improve on Paperport and allow a more comprehensive handling of large .pdf documents, particularly searching the .pdf document for terms. I will never know if Omni 18 can do any of this, because after wasting inordinate time trying to use it, I deleted the program. (To get my scanner back online, I re-installed an old Visioneer Paperport 10 program.)
This Omni 18 garbage deleted my Paperport program on installation. Then it wouldn't scan, taking inordinate time to perform the simplest tasks. The program absorbed huge amounts of computer space (1,041 MB!) and and was not intuitive. I then called Nuance and after 10-15 voice mail swithes was advised that I was expected to pay a fee (presumably per minute) for assistance in making their product work.
I am a professional (but not an IT professional). For me, time is money. It is easier and cheaper to complain about the scammers at Nuance than to waste more time and effort (which in my case is lost revenue) in trying to get this crap to perform as Nuance advertised it would. Nuance is now on my Spam-block list. There are better programs out there, and I urge you to spend a few minutes searching for them.
Steve Britt
Lawyer
Plymouth Meeting PA 19462
12 of 13 found the following review helpful:
 This is amazing!Jun 23, 2011
By M. Brown
I have been considering purchasing the omnipage 18 for quite a while. I do a lot of work for various companies and I spend more time than needed just typing up the printed pages they send in order to work with them. The omnipage 18 does all that for me! What I usually spend at least 4 hours daily doing I did today in just 1 hour and I had a ton of pages to do. This product will make my life so much easier and I am so pleased with how easy it is to use. I would recommend this to anyone who needs to turn actual pages into files they can work with on the computer.
See all 43 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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