PaperPort, Explorer pose difficulties

Several of my columns have generated questions from readers. I decided to share two of those questions, as…

Several of my columns have generated questions from readers. I decided to share two of those questions, as well as my responses.

First, there has been no shortage of interest in paperless office solutions and issues related to their setup and use.

I recently received an e-mail from Michael Edward Fox of Financial Planning Work$ Inc. in Cinnaminson, N.J., regarding ScanSoft PaperPort 11 Professional, which I mentioned in my Aug. 27 column. Essentially, the software, from Nuance Communications Inc. of Burlington, Mass., allows you to scan documents easily and then send them to an attached workstation or to PCs on your network for storage.

“Coming up with a short but identifiable file name is the problem,” Mr. Fox, who has yet to upgrade to the latest version, wrote. “PaperPort limits the name length in the settings field.”

He went on to add that in the world of paper folders, you can of course color-code folders and file names to make things easier.

There are a couple of simple ways to take advantage of what is already built into PaperPort to make it easier to find items.

For instance, keep in mind that when digitizing records, you will want to take advantage of the new format rather than imitate the way data are stored in metal file cabinets.

For instance, with PaperPort, you can also color-code folders and even sort according to those colors. You can also open the “folder notes” field (either from the drop-down menu or the menu button) and manually add information to the subject, author, or keyword fields or select to fill in keywords automatically during the scanning process.

Nuance’s senior product manager, Jeff Segarra, and senior vice president and general manager, Robert Weideman, shed more light on the matter (though their comments relate to Version 11 — $199, or $149 for an upgrade from previous versions).

PaperPort 11 allows users to have more than 100 characters in a file name, according to Mr. Segarra.

“You can use PaperPort 11’s all-in-one search capabilities to find the file for you,” he wrote in an e-mail. “If you are using [portable document format] files, you can add comments and keywords to the file properties to narrow down search results.”

If you have Nuance’s OmniPage, an image-scanning program, you can create text-searchable Adobe PDF files.

“This is helpful because our search engine has text-searching capabilities. Now, instead of searching by file name, you can search for text within the file,” Mr. Segarra wrote.

“You can also set a prefix and suffix to auto-name the file as you scan it,” Mr. Weidman wrote in an e-mail. “The new Scan Manager allows you to add notes to the meta-data as you scan, as well.”

Alexander J. Cudzewicz, a registered investment adviser at Oak Brook Asset Management in Scottsdale, Ariz., sent me an e-mail after experiencing stability issues with Version 7 of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

“After trying IE7, I uninstalled IE7 and reinstalled IE6 on my desktop,” he wrote. “I missed the multi-tab feature of IE7 which I was using on my laptop. So after Microsoft had released several patches or updates … I reinstalled IE7 on my desktop and began to wonder why it would frequently crash on my desktop but not on my laptop.”

I tested my own browser against a couple of sites mentioned by Mr. Cudzewicz, as did Internet Explorer team representatives, and we couldn’t replicate the crashes. Microsoft representatives said that he and others needing additional assistance troubleshooting IE7 should call the support number, (866) 234-6020.

Despite stability issues experienced by some users, IE7 continues to provide many compelling reasons to upgrade, the most important being security, especially the built-in anti-phishing technology, extended validation secure sockets layer certificates, default disabling of ActiveX controls and innumerable other security tweaks.

There are also many ease-of-use improvements, such as printing from the browser and the less-than-earth-shattering tabbed-browsing, QuickTabs and Really Simple Syndication preview features.

Davis D. Janowski is the technology reporter for InvestmentNews. He can be reached at djanowski@ crain.com.