Scanners can be used for more than just transferring old photographs to a computer.

Programs like Nuance's Paperport 11 allow users to store, organise and manipulate their paper documents as PDF files stored on the hard disk instead of on paper.

A big problem in the past was time: you could have organised an entire filing cabinet in the time it took for one black and white document to appear on screen. Today’s faster computers make the paperless office (or home) much more realistic.

To the casual observer this new version looks similar to older document management programs, but dig a little deeper and there are improvements. Most usefully, the accuracy of the optical character recognition (OCR) has improved. The fact that the program automatically straightens documents that have been scanned at a slight angle helps here too.

Also, as many people prefer to fill in forms on screen to avoid mistakes, the program allows for this. Documents are simpler to retrieve: as each time you a document is scanned the user is given the option to assign keywords to it for indexing.

To make it easier to scan multi-page documents, a window called the Assistant displays a small picture of each page before it appears in the main program. When all the pages of the document have been scanned they are ‘stacked’ under a heading for the document. Extra pages can be added by dragging them over the existing document icon.

The friendliness of PaperPort is increased with a selection of how-to guides that, on opening the program, offer an introduction to the most common tasks. A clear printed user guide is also included - something we don’t see enough in modern software. Sadly, the toolbar icons look too similar and their functions are not easily memorised, which hinders its useability. More flexible tools for adding notes to documents, and a less cluttered interface, would have improved this.

The minimum system requirements are unrealistic: the quoted PC with a humble Pentium processor and 256MB of memory, will struggle, and our dual-core test computer with 1GB of memory was just about sufficient for smooth usage of the program.

Vista compatibility: Yes