NeatScan To Office Software - White
by The Neat Company
|
List Price: Our Price: $250.00 You Save: $29.95 (11%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
|---|
Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of NeatScan To Office Software - White
Customer Review: NeatScan to Office, Word and PowerPoint
Summary: 5 Stars
I had no problem whatsoever installing and using the product. Scans documents to jpeg and .pdf perfectly.Customer Review: Neat (No Pun) and Valuable Tool
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I was pleasantly surprised that such a small scanner would work so well, a large part which is obviously attributable to the supplied software which converts scanned items to Microsoft or Adobe products. It took me about ½ hour to set it up which requires that you read a simple set of instructions to load the software before you connect it via USB to your computer. It needs to be connected to a USB port on your computer and not to an auxiliary port you may have on your keyboard or monitor to insure sufficient power to the scanner. You can also watch a video contained on the software disk which is of some help understanding how and what the scanner can do. One small thing that I did not notice in the instructions is that to get the required Neat Scan tool box to appear on your MS Outlook 2007 product you must push the "Add-Ins" button on your existing MS tool box. After that, it is about a 20 second process to calibrate the scanner with the paper calibration templates supplied. I then scanned a 1 full page document with an uncommon font into Word which takes about 10 seconds and another 10 seconds for it to complete conversion. It converted without error and was easily modified in word to change fonts, font size and content. From there it is like any other word document which can be emailed or printed, etc.
As with MS Word, the conversion of a Neat scan to Power Point and Adobe Reader were error free in my limited trials.
I scanned a document into one of the supplied Excel templates which is a bit more involved and lengthens the learning curve significantly. I did not get this process to work perfectly, but I am certain that I will once I put a little more time into it. It also has the capability of custom designed templates which I designed a very simple one, and it worked.
The scanner itself is very compact and is exactly wide enough for an 8 ½" page width. A page just 1/8" wider will not fit because it appears that the opening helps maintain a straight page position. The scanner is made with good quality plastic on the outside. I did not disassemble it because it appears that the rubber feet on the bottom of the unit cover the screw heads that hold the top to the bottom and I did not want to pull apart a glued joint. However, even with its outward appearance of quality, I would guess that this unit is not meant for large volumes of scanning that might be necessary in some businesses. But at the Amazon price, I think it is a good investment for a personal scanner that converts to MS and Adobe or for a small business which would treat such scanners as supplies and not long-term capital expenditures. I will update this review should I discover any problems or significant items of note during its future use.
This review relates to product performance with MS Vista 32.
Customer Review: Portable scanner that does (pretty much) what it is supposed to ...
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The Neat Company "NeatScan To Office" does what is is supposed to do - scan documents to Microsoft Office apps - seamlessly and with only a few limitations.
The scanner is quite small (1.5" x 2.5" square, about 12" long) and should easily fit into a computer bag for travel. Another plus for potability is that the unit is powered completely from a computer's USB port; no external power brick is needed. Software installation went smoothly, other than getting bit while trying to install a SW upgrade (I didn't pay attention to the "must Run as Administrator" warning for Vista, my bad).
The unit's best features are reserved for Microsoft Word plug-in, where you can scan a document in as an image, as unformatted text, or as formatted text. I thought that the Scan to Office SW did a very good job of scanning a formatted Word doument with an embedded table - I needed to do a bit of cleanup to get the table borders correct, but otherwise the formatting was very close to the original and the text was spot on. Scan to text also worked fine. The only issue I had with Word is that scanning a document as an image caused a black text on white paper to become black text on grey. When scanning color graphics, the resulting output had a significant color shift and too much contrast.
Unfortunately, not as many features were allowed for the plug-ins for Excel or PowerPoint. In particular, the Excel plug-in allows scanning as an image only; I would really have wanted some way to scan a printed spreadsheet into Excel as values. PowerPoint allows scanning documents in as an image or text; there is no option to scan as formatted text. Now of course you can work around these limitation by scanning into Word and then using cut/paste to Excel or PowerPoint, but it is too bad that these limitations do exist.
Two other things: scanning directly to a searchable PDF is supported, and scanning of B&W / color photographs is supported (but just about unusable due to the color shifts and contrast issues above).
In summary, this is a nice portable solution that does what it's made to do well, but it misses 5-star territory due to its limited functionality with Excel, and gets no extra credit due to mediocre image scanning.
Customer Review: Neat Idea!
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This review is for NeatScan To Office (White)
This is indeed a Neat Idea; Intended for business people on the go for those quick scans needed to complete your expense report on time.
The unit is sleek, small and well designed for portability, the packing is also very impressive, A lot of care has been taken in the packaging the unit. The software package installed fine on Windows XP home Operating system without any need for rebooting.
PROS:
(+) Small, Sleek, Looks cute and portable
(+) DOES not require additional power (It draws power from USB port)
(+) Scans directly into Micro$soft applications like Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc;
(+) Very fast OCR conversion (Scanning pages into Word files are fast)
(+) upto 600 DPI optical scan in other applications like MS Paint or Adobe Photoshop etc;
(+) Includes a carry bag for true portability
CONS:
(-) Photo Scans are not that great.
(-) Need to have Micro$oft Office Suite to have those Scan Buttons enabled.
(-) If the bills are crumbled the scanner fails to read the information accurately and import them into EXCEL
IMPORTANT Notes:
(**) Install the CD containing the drivers and applications ** FIRST ** before plugging in the scanner into the USB port
(**) Connect the scanner directly to the USB port on your computer, Do not connect to a non-powered USB hub or Keyboard / monitor USB port which cannot provide power to the scanner.
While the unit itself is very well designed, it has some shortfalls, the main problem is Photo Scan Quality, and it is not as good as other scanners within this price range.
But remember, this was mainly designed for portability and does a very good job in OCR conversion into Micro$oft applications.
It is indeed a nice idea and I am impressed by the OCR function of the unit, I am sure the price of this item will come down eventually making this a very good purchase.
Customer Review: A handy way to scan in documents
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This product's set up was pretty easy. They included useful instructions. It did need to be calibrated a second time before it would work and scan adequately, but that may have been human error.
We used it to scan a paper copy of a word processing document. It did pretty well, a little better than average. It translated the document well into digial format, except for the parts that had been written on (with which you would expect to have less than optimal results) and where it would just insert extra returns.
It's small and portable, which is nice. My husband is thinking about asking his office to order him one for work. We give this a good recommendation, with the caveat that it is somewhat better than the average OCR program.