ScanSoft's PaperPort Professional 10 is the best way to archive and organize documents we've ever found. Its collection of tools and features makes it easy to makes it easy to work with the existing documents on your system, find information quickly, and work with key applications from e-mail to word processing.

PaperPort began as a scanning utility, designed to be a simple document manager that let you turn paper documents into files you could manipulate on your computer. Over the years, it has evolved into a more comprehensive work environment. One pivotal change is that it has adopted the Adobe Acrobat PDF format as the storage format. It can scan documents directly to PDF files, and then edit, reorganize, and send them to other applications. It includes print drivers that let you create PDF files from any Windows application. You can even extract pages from different documents and reassemble them into a new PDF document.

Additional utilities make the program even more useful. The PageView program lets you examine a file, one page at a time. You then can annotate the file with text and drawing. If it's an image file, you can perform some basic edit functions. You can copy text from the pages and then paste it into other applications. The built-in OCR feature lets you extract text from image or PDF files. One new feature of this version of PaperPort is that you can specify that PageView opens in a new window, so you can have both your PaperPort Desktop and PageView open at the same time.

The OCR function also makes another powerful feature possible. PaperPort's All-in-One Search maintains an index of the text in documents and images, so you can search all your files quickly for a word or phrase. The feature is not quite as fast or elegant as InfoSelect, but the ability to find text within graphics images is a decided advantage.

PaperPort comes with many other functions and features. Form Typer will automatically find the blanks in a scanned form, so you can just type in your answers. You can then print out the whole document, or you can print just your answers so that they can be printed onto the original page. Desktop Delivery can monitor folders and e-mail folders to automatically deliver files and attachments to a PaperPort folder.

Best of all, the user interface is similar to Windows Explorer, so you already know how to use it. You can show the hierarchical folder tree on the left edge, drag and drop files, and display them as thumbnails or text details. Unlike Windows Explorer, you can page through the thumbnails of multipage documents right on the desktop, stack and unstack files to create multipage documents, and more. You can even split the workspace into two sections, showing different folders on the two Desktops, and then drag and drop between them. And PaperPort uses the Windows file structure, so if you want to add a certain folder and its subfolders to your PaperPort workspace, you can simply drag them from a Windows Explorer window.

The end result is that you have a total working environment that lets you organize, find, and manipulate the files you work with the most, and still have quick access to your major applications when you need to do more with your files than PaperPort offers. PaperPort Professional 10 is a program that you can live in comfortably.