Surviving the Paper Storm – Software Review – Evaluation
Joel T. Patz
PageKeeper Pro 3.0
8.5
9 8 8 8 V P E S
Requirements Win 95/98, 32MB of RAM, 150MB hard disk space,
CD-ROM drive, scanner
List Price $49
Publisher Caere Corp., 800-736-5735, 408-395-7000,
www.caere.com
IF YOU NEED MORE THAN mere folders to organize your work, run, don’t walk, to pick up PageKeeper Pro 3.0. The latest version of Caere’s document manager makes it a snap to assemble files by project or topic. You can, for example, collect a proposal, several graphic images, a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, and a spreadsheet in a single PageKeeper folder, view thumbnail images of each item, and annotate or edit each file as needed.
But PageKeeper is more than just a fancy filing cabinet. Its powerful search capabilities let you find documents by type (like graphics files), look for keywords or phrases, or refine your search to files within a specific date range. Documents you scan are automatically fed to a built-in optical character recognition (OCR) engine so text within them can be searched, too. PageKeeper displays the results of your search with a “relevancy ranking” of 1 to 100.
You can “clip” together documents in the thumbnail window, mixing multiple file types into a virtual single document that are clipped together. Thumbnails are automatically updated whenever the original documents change, but they don’t disappear when you delete a file from your PC.
And with the new PageKeeper, you don’t have to do all the work; the program’s Folder Watch and Smart Folders automatically import new documents that meet your specified criteria. It notices, for example, whenever you write a new memo in Windows’ My Documents folder that mentions Project X and automatically places that memo into the appropriate PageKeeper folder. Unless you’re a serious Type A personality, PageKeeper Pro is probably better organized than you are.
PROS Easy to organize and view your files and scanned documents
CONS Limited annotation tools
RATINGS
HOME OFFICE COMPUTING’S product scores are weighted averages of 1- to 10-point ratings for: Value (30 percent of total), Performance (30 percent of total), Ease of Use (20 percent of total), and Suitability for Home Office Use (20 percent of total).
KEY:
V = Value
P = Performance
E = Ease of Use
S = Suitability for Home Office Use
COPYRIGHT 1999 CURTCO Freedom Communications
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
