ScanSoft Textbridge Pro Millennium

If you take a page of typed text, such as a magazine article or a letter, and scan it into your computer using a scanner, you can then use optical character (OCR) recognition software to turn it into an editable text file that you can work with in a word processor. It's just as if you'd typed it in yourself, but without the drudgery. Although OCR is at its most useful in a business environment, many home users find it handy for storing and organising important household documents, such as bills and bank statements.

Chances are that your scanner came with some kind of OCR software when you bought it, although this sort of software is normally a cut-down version of the full program. If you find yourself using OCR a lot, you may want to consider upgrading.

Textbridge Pro Millennium can cope with multi-page or colour documents. It will also reproduce tables, graphics and illustrations that might be included in your document, with the original formatting and layout intact.

The software can recognise text in an impressive 56 languages, and a Live Update feature will help you track down all the latest software upgrades for your scanner and OCR program from the internet.

The main benefit of the software is its ease of use. There's a single-click OCR wizard that guides you gently from the moment you scan your source document through to proof reading your new page. Sometimes there are a few odds and ends that the OCR software might be having problems with. This could just be down to a poor scan or bad quality original document, such as a fax. In this event, the proof reader launches itself and goes through any suspect words that it finds, highlighting them and suggesting alternatives.

Once the recognition process is complete, Textbridge Pro Millennium opens your new document in a program, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, or Corel Wordperfect, and away you go. You can even format your document in HTML as a web page and open it up in Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Frontpage.

There's also a handy Instant Access feature that allows you to perform OCR from within the program you're working in.

Like speech recognition, OCR can save you an enormous amount of time retyping text, but the process depends heavily on the accuracy of the software. With less accurate OCR programs you could find that you're spending just as much time correcting your scanned document as you would have done typing it.

With that in mind, we tested Textbridge Pro Millennium on a printed letter that was in good condition and got a 100 per cent accurate result. The program struggled a bit when we tried it on a mixed content page that included text and images together, but a little jiggling about afterwards with the proof reader smoothed out most of the problems.

Textbridge Pro Millennium does not make any giant leaps in functionality from previous versions. The main difference is that the edition has full support for Windows 2000. However, since even Microsoft is advising home users to stick with Windows 98, this will probably only have an impact if you're planning to use Textbridge in the office.

Features:

• turns scanned documents into editable text
• retains page layout
• outputs your documents as web pages
• automatic proof reader
• supports 56 languages
• compatible with popular programs such as Word, Wordperfect, Excel and Frontpage.

Contact ScanSoft 0118 966 8421