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Buying Guide: OCR: Computer Literacy
Contents
- OCR: Computer Literacy
- ABBYY Finereader 10 Professional Edition
- Omnipage Professional 17
- Readiris Corporate 12
You need OCR—optical character recognition—software because there are just too many things you can't do with paper documents. OCR reads paper documents—or graphic images of documents—and converts them into digital files you can edit or archive. Modern OCR software can convert a scanned image of a letter or a magazine article or any other printed matter into Word or PDF file, or into an Excel file if the original material is a table.
The result is text that you can reuse the text and pictures in the scanned documents in the same way that you use any document you create in Word or any picture you import from a camera. Another benefit is that you can use Windows's search features to find a document in seconds instead of spending hours thumbing through printed pages.
Today's high-end OCR software works at far better speed, and with far better accuracy, than anything available only a few years ago. We found a lot to like in the three top competitors, both for individual and professional users who need tight control over output and for corporate and enterprise users who require high-volume document conversion without time-consuming manual intervention. Our Editors' Choice app, ABBYY Finereader Pro, came out almost neck-and-neck with its nearest competitor, Omnipage Professional, but we were also impressed by corporate-level features in the third-place contender Readiris Corporate. If you're drowning in paper, fire up your scanner (see our How to Buy a Scanner buying guide if you don't have one to fire up) and use one of these OCR apps to help you catch your breath.
ABBYY Finereader 10 Professional Edition
$399 direct
ABBYY Finereader 10 Professional Edition combines exceptional power to extract text and layout from almost any document with an exceptionally lucid and responsive interface. Close competitor Omnipage has a bit more in the way of automation, but if you care about getting the best possible OCR output with the fewest possible frustrations and annoyances, Finereader 10 is the clear choice.
Omnipage Professional 17
$399 direct
Omnipage Pro 17 is a powerhouse OCR program that can perform almost any OCR task at top speed, with options that let you either automate the whole OCR process for hands-off convenience, or fine-tune and correct each stage of the process for the most accurate possible results.
Readiris Corporate 12
$399 direct
Readiris Corporate 12 converts documents from scanned images into standard file formats with the least fuss (and the fewest options) of any major OCR program. But if you want to do much fine-tuning of output, Readiris isn't the app for you, because it has no spell-checking or proofreading inside the program and limited options to correct layout errors.