Building on the solid foundation that was OmniPage Professional 17, Nuance OmniPage Professional 18 ($499.99 direct) offers all the same strengths, from fast speed to powerful automation tools. It also adds features, most notably cloud connectivity and a new tool for recognizing PDF files. And it improves its interface--precisely the issue that kept version 17 from being an Editors' Choice. Unfortunately, the interface can still be a bit frustrating to use. If you're willing to put up with it, though, OmniPage is one of the most capable OCR programs available, especially for high-volume, automated OCR applications.

When we reviewed OmniPage 17, one of the complaints we had about the interface was that, unlike Readiris Corporate 12 ($399 direct, 2.5 stars) or the current Editors' Choice ABBYY FineReader 10 ($399 direct, 4.5 stars), OmniPage didn't offer a startup menu of common tasks, such as scanning to a PDF or Word file.

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That objection has been addressed in OmniPage 18 with a Start Page that offers a list of common tasks. Click on a task, and the program hand carries you through each step from scanning or loading a file to saving the result. The various choices start with a camera image, PDF file, or scanned document and end up with an Excel, Word, or OmniPage document; a Searchable PDF; or a speech file (a WAV file you can play like an audio book). Although the Start page can make some tasks easy however, it doesn't come into play if you bypass the options and go directly to OmniPage's more basic interface. But more on that later.

Accuracy
Top-tier OCR programs like OmniPage have long since reached the point where text recognition accuracy isn't much of an issue and is impractical to test for. With accuracy already in the range of 98 percent or better, a small improvement, like the claimed 18 percent greater accuracy for OmniPage Professional 18, is hard to confirm without testing hundreds, or even thousands, of originals.

The simple truth is that if you need 100 percent accuracy, you'll have to proofread the result. If you can live with occasional errors, my tests confirm that OmniPage 18 makes few recognition mistakes. I ran across a user review on one Web site recently that complained about OmniPage Professional 18 having one or two errors in every seven or eight pages. Assuming only 250 words per page, which is about the fewest you could expect for any page format, and two errors per eight pages, that would work out to one error every 1000 words, or 99.99 percent word accuracy. (The complaint obviously came from a seriously overboard perfectionist.)

Format accuracy is even harder to test for. Nuance claims a 67 percent improvement in OmniPage Professional 18, but if you try to test for formatting errors, the number you come up with will depend on both the originals you use and how you count errors. If the program makes the same mistake 100 times in one heavily formatted document, for example, you'll get a different number if you count it as a single mistake than if you count it as 100 separate mistakes.

The most useful information I can give is that with my suite of test files, when sending files to an editable format, OmniPage Professional 18 did at least as well as Readiris and FineReader overall. For most text pages, it created Word files that needed no fixes in the format, with only minor fixes needed in the rest.

It had a problem creating spreadsheets from tables that had more than one line of text per row in some cells, putting each line in its own spreadsheet row, and requiring time-consuming manual fixes. However, I have yet to see a program that does any better with this format.