Converting paper documents into electronic ones needs two things: a scanner or camera, and optical character recognition (OCR) software.

Once you have a document as a computer file, though, it needs to be effectively editable for easy retrieval. Paperport is designed to do both these things and is just about the only document manager available at a reasonable price for the home or small business customer.

Paperport 12 offers a simple process in which each document you scan or load is shown as a thumbnail of its first page. It works with whatever scanner is connected to the computer, either a standalone flatbed model or the scanner section of a combined printer/scanner. Choose the type of scan that's needed – black-and-white or colour – and the software will automatically handle problems such as adjusting the contrast and straightening the final image.

That's only the start, though. At the bottom of the Paperport screen are a series of icons taken from the applications that it finds on the computer. If you want to convert the scanned documents into Word or PDF format, drag the document icon over the appropriate program icon and the OCR application converts it automatically.

Nuance makes the leading Omnipage OCR engine and the version included here did a very good job with the test documents we tried coming through looking very much like the originals, but with editable, searchable text. Having a searchable PDF file, where each page has text rather than being scanned pictures of pages, is a lot more useful and, as a bonus, takes up less room on the hard disk. A full version of Nuance’s PDF Reader software is included.

Paperport 12 works not only with scanned images but can also handle pictures of documents taken using a digital camera. The software can correct an image skewed left or right, forward or back in three dimensions. Using a camera can be a lot easier than carrying round a scanner so if you have to scan documents when away from a computer this is a bonus.

The program can be used for categorisation and filing of documents, offering 29 different colour tags to help organise the work. It can also create PDF files from mixed content, so you can put together a PDF containing, for example, a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet and photos.