NeatWorks - 2.1.7

I have a Fujitsu S510M (one of the scanners supported by NeatWorks for Mac.) I've been waiting for v2+ before taking the plunge, needing to scan and work with nearly two years worth of paperwork that was falling out of two vast in-trays on my shelf.

Here's the good:

- it works fine with the S510M and can override the SnapScan driver settings

Here's the not so good:

- Emailing: Unlike almost EVERY other program for the Mac, NeatWorks decides that your only email client can and will be Apple Mail. If you use Entourage, or anything else, you cannot email a PDF from within the program. I contacted technical support and they confirmed that's how the program is hard wired. No matter what your default email client is set to be.

- Scanning weirdness: I scanned over 300 documents today. When I went back through the list of scanned items, I noticed about 7 of them had, inexplicably, scanned in 'negative' (the background was black and the type was white.) I had to go back through my paperwork and find those particular documents, re-scan them and then they scanned correctly in positive. I have no explanation, other than scanning in more that 50 documents at a time seemed to stress out the program, which performs OCR and PDF creation in the background as new scans are being fed in.

- Program Freeze: After scanning about 50-60 documents in a row, the program seems to max out into spinning beach ball territory. Force quitted, then restarted. Fortunately my database wasn't corrupt.

- Everything in a bundle: I hate the way Aperture and Entourage store all your data in one big (sometimes many GBs) file. If you open those files (view package contents) you can find all your individual files, but they usually have long random string names and meta-tagged to the underlying database in the program. Neatworks is the same. One big a** file with everything in it, with vague names.

- Life is not just a collection of receipts, documents and contacts: Unfortunately, these are the only three types of documents the program allows you to assign to something you scan. Well, what about a utility bill? That's an invoice, not a receipt. Or what about a statement? That's a, well, statement not a receipt. You can create 'collections' and 'smart collections' to gather up all your scans according to criteria (but it's a somewhat arcane process). The Neat folks would be well advised to look at how iTunes handles setting up smart collections. Anyway, the program is essentially a database, so why can't users add document 'types' other than the three listed above.

- Amazon receipts are not contacts: You know those little 3 x 5 inch receipts you get in your Amazon box? Invariably, when NeatWorks 'analyzes' those, it thinks they are contacts and creates a new contact with, of course, a bunch of gobbledegook in every field.

Anyway, with a lot of manual touching up, and keeping an eye open for the weird inverted scans, it mostly works and does a reasonably handy job integrating with my S510M and generating PDFs when I need them. I had an old PaperPort back in the OS9 (or was it OS 8?) days before they stiffed the Mac platform. Kudos to Neat for at least recognizing that the Mac market is not ALL that small anymore and actually providing SOMETHING for us to work with.