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Software Office ::
NeatWorks Digital Filing System Software for Mac
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Our Price: $67.30
List Price: $79.95
Your Save: $ 12.65 ( 16% )
Sales Rank: #657 (lower is better)
Availability: Usually ships in 2 to 4 weeks
Manufacturer: The Neat Company
Avg. Customer Rating:  
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Brand: The Neat Company
EAN: 0899061000582
Format: CD-ROM
Manufacturer: The Neat Company
Model: 00582
Release Date: 2009-02-16
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
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NeatWorks Digital Filing System Software for Mac Features
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- Scan in receipts to create expense reports, keep records of spending and save digital copies for tax purposes
- Scan business cards into your Address Book
- Scan documents to capture text that you can edit. Create searchable PDF's
- Software works with Neat and other scanners
- Organize your documents into separate libraries. Import PDF copies of business cards, receipts and documents stored on your hard drive
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NeatWorks Digital Filing System Software for Mac Description
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NeatWorks Software for Mac enables you to scan receipts, business cards and documents so you can organize, store and secure all your important information using a compatible scanner. The patented technology identifies and extracts the important information¿and automatically organizes it for you. Transform receipts into expense reports, scan business cards into Address Books contacts and create searchable PDF files from any document. Export information to PDF, Excel and Quicken. NeatWorks for Mac was built from the ground-up to look and feel like the OS X applications you use. It features drag-and-drop, multiple views, ¿print to¿ NeatWorks functionality and imports e-receipts. NeatWorks software is compatible with the Neat Mobile Scanner, Fujitsu S300 and S510M, HP Officejet J6480, Canon Pixma MP480, Canon Pixma MX410
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NeatWorks Digital Filing System Software for Mac customer reviews:
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Painful to use
The software is slow and buggy, sometimes taking several minutes to start up. The proprietary format is useless, and the PDF support is primitive and not very helpful. I wish I had purchased a different product.
Bad UI, Bad usability, Memory hog, crashes, altogether awful
I feel bad writing this because I met the NeatCo folks at MacWorld and they were genuinely nice and engaged in the product they're building.
Now that that's out of the way, I paid $350 for their scanner bundled with this software and think it's completely unusable junk. I only use it for OCR now and put everything in Evernote instead.
As I write this, I can't even switch to NeatWorks because it's completely locked up doing OCR on a PDF. My fan is running at maximum speed on the current top-of-the-line MacBook Pro.
It crashes frequently and doesn't save.
It does an awful job of processing yellow receipts, especially those with blue text.
The organizational structure is confining and frustrating, forcing you to choose a "folder" for each scan type, and preventing you from tagging things across multiple smart folders. For example, in useful software like Evernote or Yep, I can tag something *taxes* *2009* *w2* *house*. Nope, not in NeatWorks. Pick one, and that's where it has to stay.
Then try searching for something. Wait 3 minutes. Great, let's look for all documents with the text "2009" in it. There's your search results. Now drag one to a folder and...hey! NeatWorks clears the search and you have to do it all over again.
Try scanning a document. Oh no, it's about 2 degrees tilted and the OCR isn't working right. Want to fix it? Sure. Crack open the file in the Neat library bundle, search for the PDF (or drag it out of the NeatWorks main window on to your desktop). Open it in Preview. Use image adjustment to fix the angle by 2 degrees. Save it. Drag it back in to NeatWorks. Reprocess. Only took 4 minutes! Or neat could just build all the os x coreimage utilities into this app, since they are readily available, and let us do this within the program.
So by now you're frustrated and you want to report a problem. Contact their support. Wait a week. No response. Do it again. Still no response. Maybe the third time you'll get a form letter back that may or may not actually address the issue (like the software's habit of forgetting where the scanner is in the middle of a large document scan and causing you to cancel). Post in the forums? Don't bother, you'll only get other customers sharing their grief.
Anyway, I hope to do two things with this review:
1) dissuade potential customers from making the same mistake
2) Give visibility to this and pressure NeatCo to get their ass in gear and releases stable, quality software
For what it's worth, upon buying my NeatDesk for Mac I recommended it to two people, both of whom have already returned theirs, bought SnapScans, and are using them with Yep/Evernote instead. I'd rather not give up yet and hope to give the next version of this 5 stars. Come on neatco...
Not reliable
I bought this software for use with the Fujitsu Scansnap. In my quest for a paperless office I was using the "direct to pdf" feature which is a real timesaver. One day it suddenly quit working. After three weeks with customer support they finally said that "this feature is not supported" for non-neatworks scanners.
Hmmm. So it worked for months and then suddenly was "not supported".
As others have noted, this is not a company that supports it's products. Don't buy it.
Incredible piece of software
CAVEAT - I just switched from PC to Mac (my life has started anew), so anything Mac is wonderful. BUT, I have been a Neat Receipts user for many years on the PC so I have a frame of reference to some degree. I absolutely abhorred the PC version and it took me hours to do my receipts. But you know the saying, "the Devil you know...".
Either Neat has recently come out with a much more stable/functional update to Neatworks for Mac, or the other reviewers here just had really bad luck or system problems. I can't remember using a more intuitive, functional and enjoyable piece of software, and my productivity has at least tripled. Neatworks takes advantage of the best of Mac capabilities, at least based on my limited Mac use so far. But there are a number of features that are just outstanding:
1. You can print any document using the normal Print/PDF menu item for any application and there is an option in the drop down for print to Neatworks, where you can automatically send the PDF into your receipts folder. It even automatically detects the type of item it is, receipt, contact or document, depending on the contents of the item. PC's don't have an equivalent function and you need to use something like PrimoPDF so this is partly a Mac improvement benefit, but nevertheless it is very seamless and much simpler than what you had to do with the PC version to get a PDF into the system. So it is two clicks from the point of printing your email receipt from a hotel to it completing the OCR and filling in the fields.
2. The interface alone is dramatically simplified. The PC version had a bunch of jumbled tabs that made it hard to navigate. Creating and managing folders is much simpler.
3. I have just started entering data, so I don't know about the 999 record limit or whatever was said in another review, but the application seems extremely stable and performs exceptionally well.
4. Probably the best feature of all - and it may be in the latest PC version but I'm not sure - is that once you scan in an item, Neatworks makes each part of the item available to you as a separate component that you can drag and drop directly from left to right into the item fields. AND - let's say the object that you are dragging includes a bunch of information in addition to a date, for example - as is the case with the "Subject" field of an email - it will automatically parse out just the date information from the entire subject line and put it into the date field of the item, perfectly formatted. I can't remember using any piece of software that has such intelligence.
5. It supports all of the best Mac interface capabilities (again based on my limited use so far), for example the two-finder zoom and pan features to zoom into a receipt to drag/drop information.
6. The video tutorials are excellent and very short, focusing on the key capabilities.
7. Using my old PC version of the Neat scanner with Neatworks for Mac was more than seamless - I simply plugged it into my USB port and Neatworks recognized it immediately.
8. The installation was seamless and fast - it asked me if I wanted to get the latest version and I said yes, and everything worked great from there.
Only one con so far:
1. It automatically puts all new receipts or other items directly into your "Inbox" and then you need to drag/drop the item into the specific folder where the item belongs. I'm sure there is an option to change this but I haven't found it yet. It would be nice to highlight the destination folder and it would put it directly in there.
So - and no I'm not a Neat employee or anything - you can check my other reviews - Neatworks is really a joy to work with.
I strongly recommend Neatworks without any reservations.
Jack of all trades, master of none
I tried Neatworks with my Scansnap 1500 and found it extremely lacking in about every area to the competition.
For documents it did an okay job, but I found that Evernote was far more useful, since it has clients for mac, pc, iphone, and most other platforms which meant I could access my documents everywhere. Also Evernote does handwriting recognition which neatworks doesn't. That meant that I was able to get my handwritten notes indexed as well.
For business cards it was pretty bad. I do most of my business internationally and neatworks was all but useless on the business cards I had. I used cardiris instead, and it works amazingly well against almost any business card I threw at it. It also imported directly to outlook, entourage, or other address books such as the apple address book. Far better.
For receipts it came close to the competition (since there isn't much out there), but the receipt it shows you to transcribe from is too small to read. The OCR is useless for most of my international receipts (as is that of the competition), but the interface isn't very good for recognizing and inputting things manually, because you have to double click every reciept to get a large view and then try to copy that information over to a form in a different window that has way too many fields that you can't get rid of. It has a few custom fields but these don't always work correctly in the various exports and reports. I ended up using Mariner Paperless, which does a better job of making this process streamlined. It's reporting and exporting capabilities aren't as good as neatworks, but at least I could get the receipts in quickly and accurately without a bunch of jumping around.
One thing I did like about neatworks was it's interface for moving OCR data into a form by drag and drop. If the OCR data had been better that could have been a killer feature, but alas since the OCR data was useless, so was this feature.
If you really want to only have one piece of software to do these functions, you can get neatworks, but I would recommend you to get a scansnap 1500 and get dedicated applications such as evernote (free), cardiris (bundled with scansnap), and mariner paperless. The scansnap makes it easy to switch between these programs and each of them are quite competent at their jobs.
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