The paperless office never materialized, and it would be extremely helpful to search our paper documents with the same ease that desktop search tools let us find electronic documents, e-mail messages, and Web pages. ScanSoft's PaperPort has excelled at this for years. True, you do have to scan the papers first, but PaperPort Professional 10 ($199.99 direct) takes it from there, converting the documents to PDF format, recognizing the text within them, and indexing the text for fast searching. PaperPort Professional can also index a few other formats, including Word, Excel, and HTML.

Unlike the desktop search tools, PaperPort Professional can't index e-mail, though a new DesktopDelivery feature can monitor Outlook and Lotus Notes e-mail folders and import copies of attachments into designated PaperPort folders, where they'll be added to the searchable documents.

PaperPort Professional lets you extract pages from different documents and reassemble them into PDFs. "These capabilities are particularly useful for people in professions where they collect a lot of different kinds of documents—such as realtors or insurance agents," says Robert Weideman, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at ScanSoft. "For example, a real estate agent might scan rental agreements, forms, photos, and more and collect them on a system where they need to search across all the file types."

PaperPort Professional has many other useful features, including FormTyper, which can recognize fields in scanned forms so that you can fill them in on your PC.

ScanSoft has designs on extending the search capabilities into even more exotic territory. The company owns the Dragon line of NaturallySpeaking speech recognition and audio-mining products and says that future versions of PaperPort may include ways to search audio and video files, both local and online, for specific content. That would be getting very close to the Holy Grail of being able to search for absolutely anything. (For a full review of PaperPort Professional 10, see http://go.pcmag.com/paperport10 .)