Reviews of Consumer and Small Business OCR Software

Which is the best OCR software for your purposes? See the results of my OCR tests.

With a big OCR job coming up it was time for me to find suitable software that would be efficient and effective. My research led me to trial and test a variety of programs that are marketed as being suitable for home and small business use.

The results from my testing are listed below with links to actual images of results so you can see for yourself what I experienced.

My results are subjective and biased toward the particular style of results I am seeking from these OCR programs. You may have a different use and so your evaluation of these results will probably be different to mine. The images of my results are important because they allow you to make your own evaluation. These tests were done with the software using the standard settings as it came out of the box. Some of the software allows extensive customization and tweaking but I stuck to the basics in my initial testing. Scoring is relative to the results achieved using the different OCR programs being tested. OK, lets get into the OCR reviews!

OCR Test - Click Here

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ScanSoft OmniPage 16

OmniPage 16 is one of the leading OCR programs for home and office use. Because there is no trial version of OmniPage 17 I had to do my testing using a trial version of OmniPage 16. Apparently v17 has improved iphone and Kindle support, faster launch times, improved accuracy, and better integration with Microsoft Office. Overall I was favorably impressed with its capabilities and ended up purchasing it for my OCR project.

I found OmniPage 16 easy to use straight out of the box. Of the three options I was presented with on opening the program I selected QuickConvert View which has the simplest interface and automatic functions. On straight-forward OCR jobs the software does most of the work for you. Once you have input the job parameters it goes off and completes the various stages of production and then presents you with the final product.

Simple jobs were a breeze and lived up to the advertising hype, but once I tried to OCR more complex items I started to run into problems. Click on the OCR Test link to find out more

• Easy to Use
• MS Office integration
• Good value
• Automation saves time
• Accurate

OCR Test - Click Here

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Abbyy FineReader 10

Abbyy FineReader 10 is the latest upgrade of this popular software that has been around for a while. I have been using a much earlier version of this software for many years with good results.

Although the scores are similar to OmniPage the results produced by Abbyy FineReader were quite different. If you take a look at the images showing the test output results you will see what I mean. In fact the best OCR software would be a combination of the best features of both of these programs. There is a lot to like about FineReader and it deserves to be popular.

Abbyy FineReader also breezed through tests of simple OCR jobs that had basic layouts but it's the difficult jobs that display the strengths and weaknesses of a particular program. Click on the OCR Test link to find out more...

• Good feature set
• Loads fast
• Simple clean interface
• Huge choice of languages
• Capable reader
• Good editing tools

OCR Test - Click Here

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Microsoft Office 2007

Yes, believe it or not Microsoft Office 2007 includes OCR software.

It's called Microsoft Office Document Imaging and although very basic it's quite a good little program. It's hidden aweay in the Microsoft Tools folder. Before you get too excited, it does have it's limitations - it only creates and use TIFF files. I found the standard of OCR to be quite high and it was easy to send the results to MS Word 2007 for editing and printing. I liked the way it was smart enough to rotate my scans automatically so that the text was oriented correctly. The complex test was output as a single column in MS Word rather than a formatted page, so it wasn't what I was looking for, but on simpler projects with legible text it holds its own surprisingly well. Many people will find this OCR software sufficient for their needs.

• You may already own it
• Fast
• Easy to use
• Integrated with Office Suite
• Short learning curve
• Surprising accurate
• Good for simple jobs

100% Money Back Guarantee

The products I have reviewed here all appear to have money back guarantees, but please double-check before you buy.

The guarantee period may be only 2 weeks, up to 30 days. I suggest you take advantage of a free ocr software trial if one is available before you go ahead and purchase something that may not suit your particular need.