The software was very easy to install. The program comes with a CD that is self starting after insertion into CD ROM drive. Just follow the instruction that appears on the screen. You then have to just restart your computer and you are ready to start working.

Cost for upgrade $79.00 for a previous version of Caere's OmniPage software. Cost for upgrade if you own any other OCR is $99. There were recently ads for this program for as little as $49.00, with instant rebates at some of the discount stores.

Character Recognition Software is used to scan documents into files. It avoids the necessity of retyping an article you wish to save on your computer. I found the software easy to use for text scanning and inserts into either Word or WordPerfect. I had very little editing to do on an inserted document. This version has controls, not in previous versions, to scan at a specific interval so you can swap pages on a flatbed scanner. Thus you can scan multiple documents without having to stop and restart the process with each new page. I also found the tips of the day that came up whenever you started the program to be a very helpful feature of this software.

The one negative I with the program was it did not recognize handwritten text, nor did it do a good job of recognizing a magazine page with both text and pictures. The text was fine but the pictures were not legible no matter how I tried to correct them.

I overall found the software did a much better job of character recognition than either the software that came with my PaperPort Scanner or the TextBridge Pro software I had been using. I would give this software a grade of 85%, which I think is great. It is well worth the price they ask for this software. It really does turn paper into computer documents without retyping. Thus instead of scanning documents and printing them in order to save them; they can now be saved on your hard drive.