These also serve as an introduction to ScanSnap’s impressive range of scan-manipulation features. ScanSnap Manager provides further fine-tuning via its advanced Settings. Instead, I would need to launch the Abbyy software to locate and load the scan file. For example, after sending a scan to Preview, I might want to return to Quick Menu to choose Scan to Word. For example, I added Preview, allowing me to immediately view the results of a scan.Ī minor downside of the ScanSnap software is that you cannot revert back to Quick Menu after making a selection.
New in the latest update to the software, you can add your own preferred apps to Quick Menu. Everything in Quick Menu is handled via separate (often third-party) destinations. In contrast to Neat for Mac, there is no single ScanSnap container for storing and managing scans. Other options include converting scans to searchable PDFs (which ScanSnap can optionally do during a scan and do so much faster than Neat), creating fully editable text opened in Microsoft Office apps (via bundled Abbyy FineReader OCR software) and extracting business card data (to CardMinder).Īfter a scan is complete, ScanSnap Manager’s Quick Menu is your next stop. Additionally, you can send scans to various cloud services, such as Dropbox and Evernote. You can select to print a scan, configure it as an email attachment, or just save it to a folder in the Finder. ScanSnap iX500 The ScanSnap Manager’s Quick Menu offers an array of potential actions for a scan. I was also unable to get a usable result from the Expense Report options, despite several attempts.
For example, I’m still not exactly sure what From Web Import does and could find no mention of it in the manual. Too often, I had trouble figuring out how certain features work.
Neat for Mac would benefit from interface tweaks. In fact, when I scanned a document, without first launching Neat for Mac, Image Capture opened by default. Alternatively, if you bought a Neat scanner, but prefer to bypass its software, the hardware works with OS X’s Image Capture. It can be configured to work with a variety of other scanners, including ScanSnaps. If you like the sound of Neat for Mac software, but not the NeatDesk hardware, you can purchase Neat ($80) as a stand-alone software product. You can also copy/paste text from a scanned image to a word processing app. While Neat can extract text from a document, such as for filling in receipt or business card text boxes, don’t expect anything close to 100 percent accuracy (to be fair, I don’t know any software that does this well). Neat plans to add more features to NeatMobile later this year, including editing on an iOS device of data extracted from documents “scanned” with the camera. For example, iCloud users can almost as conveniently transfer photos from their iPhone to their Mac via Photo Stream, and import them to Neat if desired. Even if everything worked perfectly, the service doesn’t seem worth paying a monthly fee-unless you use it very frequently. Other times, loading stalled with a persistent spinning sundial. Sometimes a selected scan loaded quickly. Going the other way, the mobile app’s ability to view scans from a Mac was inconsistent. However, I could not get the camera to focus in the Neat app, which sometimes resulted in photos too blurry for OCR processing.
In my testing, transferring a photo from an iPhone to a Mac worked well.
The service requires that you open an account and pay a minimum of $6 per month. NeatMobile accomplishes all of this by shunting your data through its new NeatCloud service. Going in the other direction, scans stored on your Mac sync to NeatMobile on all your iOS devices. If the photo is of a text document, Neat’s OCR processing software kicks in and analyzes it. NeatDesk With the NeatMobile iOS app, you can take a photo and wirelessly send it to your Mac. Tap NeatMobile’s Scan button to take a photo and send it as a scanned image to your Mac.