ABBYY's ScanTo Office is a low-cost scan conversion utility that helps you to turn paper documents into editable Microsoft Word and Excel files, or into e-mail attachments. Designed for home or small-business users, the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software doesn't have the features of a dedicated OCR program, but it's a snap to use and costs almost half of the price of a decent OCR package. Having said that, its poor scan results mean it's far from being a perfect alternative to a dedicated OCR package, its features are relatively limited, and you need Microsoft's Office to get the best out of it. Those who need to turn paper-based documents into editable format would be better advised to purchase a proper OCR package, such as ABBYY's FineReader 7.0 Professional.

Pros: Low cost; easy to use; relatively quick
Cons: Entry-level features; poor results; requires Microsoft's Office


Designed for those who want to quickly unlock and repurpose information from paper documents or images - and those who don't necessarily need all the functionality of an OCR package - ScanTo Office works as a plug-in for Word, Excel and Outlook. It also has a wizard that can be launched as a stand-alone application. In addition, it can be accessed through Windows explorer's context menu by right-clicking on existing images on your hard disk. The software also supports standard image files, such as BMP, PCX, DCX, JPEG, JPEG 2000, TIFF, and PNG, and lets you save files as a Word DOC (version 2000 or later), Excel XLS (version 2000 or later), RTF or PDF (image only for e-mailing).

Using ScanTo Office is very similar to ABBYY's PDF Transformer (£29.99 ex. VAT), a software utility for converting PDF files into editable Microsoft Word, Excel, HTML, or TXT format. The reason for this is because it follows the same easy-to-use, wizard-driven conversion process.

Similar to all OCR packages, ScanTo Office promises to retain the original look of the source file. However, the degree of accuracy in testing was far from impressive, failing to retain the same look and feel as the original document, and garbling up graphics, tables, columns and fonts. Character recognition was also poor, and scanned text files were littered with spelling mistakes and wrong characters, which was very surprising given ABBYY's experience in OCR technology.

You can either scan paper documents or open images from within Word and Excel for editing and saving, open images from a context menu of Windows Explorer to convert them into editable formats (DOC or XLS), or scan paper documents and open images from within Outlook, convert them and forward them by e-mail as either a Word or Excel document or PDF image only file. Alternatively, you can start from scratch using the ScanTo Office Wizard.

ABBYY ScanTo Office 'talks' with scanners via the TWAIN interface. This is a standard adopted in 1992 for the interaction of computer image input devices (such as scanners) and external applications. This means that all scanning settings are made in the dialog box provided by the TWAIN driver. In this dialog box, the preview image option normally becomes available. The option allows you to set the scanning area and tune brightness precisely, and to see how changes affect the previewed image.

As expected, the quality of conversion largely depends on the quality of the image obtained by scanning. However, the image quality may be improved by altering such scanning parameters as scan mode, resolution, and brightness. ScanTo Office allows you to scan in greyscale (256 shades of gray), black and white (enables the system to scan at a higher speed but at the same time some character information is lost) or colour. You can also set the scan resolution and configure brightness settings. From our tests we noted that most documents scanned in black and white mode required additional brightness tuning to get the best results.

Business users will be pleased to know that the software supports multiple-page document scanning. This mode is enabled by selecting the 'I'm going to scan a multipage document' box, and allows you to scan manually or use your scanner's Automatic Document Feeder (ADF). Of course, if you intend to use an ADF, you'll have to make sure the option is selected from your scanner's TWAIN driver.

You can also set the program to scan a book, convert a text written in several languages (supports 37 conversion languages), retain the original formatting of an entire document or remove the formatting. When scanning a book, we noticed that results were better if, after scanning, the image of the two pages is split into two, with each image corresponding to a single book page. Layout analysis and de-skewing are then performed separately for each page.

Converted text can be saved to a file (in any of the supported formats), opened in an Office application (without saving to disk), or attached to a new e-mail message as an RTF file or as an image-only PDF file. When saving in DOC/RTF, you can choose to retain or remove the formatting (including paragraph arrangement, font and font size, columns, text direction, text colour, and table structure), keep or remove the pictures, or highlight uncertain characters in a colour of your choice. These are particularly useful options if you only need to input text from a document, such as a letter or mailshot.

BIOS, Jan 13, 05 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Utilities