Review by Bask In My Awesomeness

Omnipage 18 is an advanced conversion utility which allows the use to do something as simple as scanning a document into a PDF to converting a complicated scan or PDF into an editable Word Document. There are numerous options available.

My interest was caught with this because I have some printed documents that I no longer could find the original files for. Scanning them in, I was able to create word documents that pretty much mimicked the original.

As a test, I took my car insurance card and scanned it. Omnipage formatted it and organized it to lay out exactly like the card does (other programs with OCR simply jumble all the text together). Actually, what I saw on screen was exactly the insurance card but it was editable.

The biggest issue I had was with hand written documents. Trying to port these in to edit in a typed word document just didn’t work. I am not really surprised at this and I did not expect it to work but I thought I’d mention it. I did use this to scan in a form that I wanted to be able to update. Omnipage created the tables and everything. I had to make a few minor edits but it wasn’t much.

Naturally, simply scanning a document into a PDF is easy and it works pretty much like Adobe Acrobat would for this. All in all, this is a very useful program, especially since it does a good job formatting (you can do columns, tables, etc). Depending on your need, it could potentially save hours of retyping, especially if you have old documents that no longer have an electronic counterpart.