Others say...

"NUance=NOsupport"
if you need reasonable support, DO NOT BUY anything from noserviceNuance. this product has glitches that will eat memory and ignore commands from the menu bar; that's only the start of terrible experiences. from there, you get one free contact with semi-literate support, and then have to pay them for them to try to correct problems with their product. STAY AWAY unless you are a guru.

"Why would you remove a key feature?"
I have been using Omnipage 14 for about 2 years. When 15 came out, I had my company purchase the upgrade (14 was good but could use some better features). My company regularly scans very large documents and ports them to an excel file so that the data can be imported into a database. 14 worked great for doing this, especially if you used the Workflow Assistant, since it would combine all the pages of the document into one tab in an Excel worksheet (if you don't use the Workflow, it seperates the pages onto seperate tabs). Imagine my dismay when, after installing 15, I found out that it now exports each page of the document onto separate tabs regardless of if you use Workflows or not!! With a 100 page document, that's hours of work to copy and paste all of that data onto one tab! When I called Nuance, their support told me that Omnipage was never able to export to just one excel tab, despite the fact that I have been doing it all along! So we decided to go back to using 14. Unfortunately due to a bug, once you install Windows Service Pack 2, you are no longer able to save your templates that you make in 14, rendering the program almost useless unless you want to take hours formatting each page for the OCR. I've tried searching Nuance's website for the answers to this technical problem, but their on-line help is meager at best and even has several dead links on it! Not to mention the strangely convenient dead links for the Omnipage community forum on-line, which might make a dent in Nuance's phone support cash cow. I would not recommend any product which removes a key feature in a so-called "upgrade". I was told by support that this feature is still absent from 16. This product would be suitable for a company that only handles very small OCR jobs, and can get by without needing customer support. As for my company, after using Omnipage for several years, we have decided to move onto other products.

"Fast and easy"
Altough this product has many options that I'll probably never use, I had received a number of printed documents from our finance department that I needed to change and use in a presentation. Rather than retyping and recreating the whole thing (would have taken me several hours) I scanned and OCR with OmniPage and saved in Excel. So I started to edit in less than 10 minutes...

"Bloats PDF files to four times their original size"
I purchased this to create searchable pdf images from standard pdf images on the fly. Unfortunately, if you use any of the automated options via the batch manager, it will create bloated files that are three to four times the size of the original. If you manually run each document through Omnipage, the size remains the same or sometimes even reduces the amount of disk space used. This is a significant bug that tech support hasn't addressed yet. So if you don't mind using it manually for every document, then it's OK. Otherwise, wait for a fix.

"Not up to my expectations"
I have been a long time user of OmniPage, going way back to version 4. I have regularly updated every 2 years or so, often enjoying the speed or work flow improvements.

I upgraded to OmniPage 16 via an email solicitation and decided to buy it. Unfortunately after a successful install, registration, and activation, the software would not run. The splash screen would display, and then the program would end.

At this point I come face to face with Nuance support and realize I should have read the support for this product before buying. I could find nothing in the online Knowledge Base forum related to my problem. Phone support is a toll call, and requires long periods of hold, and costs $19.95 per incident (with the first one free). Email support is $9.95 per incident.

Luckily the phone support was able to solve my problem in about an hour. I had to install and run some special snooping software which gathered my system information which I mailed to the support team. Unfortunately, I have now used up my one free incident and won't pursue some of the other bugs I see. Be sure you are comfortable with this limited software support before buying.