I’ve been working toward a paperless “office” at home. Bills, statements, receipts, legal documents, instructions, warranties, etc. etc. I had been using NeatWorks with the Neat mobile scanner for a while and I never could get it to “click” and become seamless. I never did experience the crashing issues others so often complain about but it is just annoying to use and slow, even on my i7 iMac.
Last night, I downloaded DTPO, read the tutorials and viewed the videos. This morning I setup a folder structure that roughly mirrored my physical file cabinets and copied over a TON of NeatWorks data via simple drag and drop from one application to another. I can’t get over how simple this was.
I had originally set the database up on a TrueCrypt encrypted volume, which worked fine, but I ended up moving it to an encrypted sparsebundle to make Time Machine happy. (when on earth is Apple going to let us encrypt our backups anyway???)
I have a Canon MX860 and the Neat Mobile scanner, both scanners work but not from inside DTPO. I suspect if I fiddled I could get the Canon working, I just scanned with the Canon software and/or VueScan and imported, worked like a champ.
DTPO so clearly meets my needs that I just ordered a ScanSnap S1500M from Amazon. As soon as I confirm it works as expected with DTPO I will happily be purchasing my DTPO license.
Thank you for finally solving my home document management problems! My shredder is going to get a workout!
I just got Personal, so to speak, and a big thumbs-up to you people.
This is the programme I have been looking for all my computer life.
A tidy system means you can focus on the priorities, so thank you very much.
I concur with the positive remarks about DTPO. My favourite features are:-
I’m finding it a fabulous tool for organising my reading materials, and use the editor for writing RTFs - a click on See Also can flag up otherwise invisible correlations between something I’m writing and things stored and forgotten.
The OCR, especially with ExactScan is very smooth. The searchable PDFs aren’t quite 100% perfect, but pretty close, and for searching and concordance purposes very effective.
The ability to open files from within the database with their originating applications and then save them back into the database is also well thought out and executed software design. I can organise Power Point presentations and even enormous Photoshop files in the same folder structure and edit them from within it. I had files lock up on me once (though they could be saved externally), but this was in any case remedied by a reboot.
It’s possible to use DT as a photo database, about which I’ll comment in more detail sometime, as I have suggestions for improvements.
Thanks for the app that’s finally got me organising my thoughts properly!
Might it help you to know if/how I can get it working with a friend’s Canon MX870? Are you running Snow Leopard?
Unfortunately my LiDE 50 mysteriously died a few months ago so I reverted back to using an old N1240U with VueScan. No hope getting that working directly with DTPO (and other apps) because Canon stopped updating software for that discontinued model well before SL.
Thankfully my iP5000 printer’s still working well, even though that’s currently an inhibitor to getting a new scanner. Right now I’d be satisfied with an all-in-one device (like the MX870) but can’t justify it while I’ve got a decent working printer regardless of my desire for a better scanner (which I sure could put to use now more than ever, esp. with an ADF). So, I’m limping along with the N1240U until my situation changes, postponing some heavier volume scanning I’ll eventually do.
