Product Reviews

If you have a stack of business cards sitting on your desk and you need their details transferred to your PC, CardScan's Personal can help. The kit comes with a small USB-powered business card scanner and the necessary software to convert scanned images into fields.

As is usual for this kind of software, the main screen looks dated and confusing, as there are lots of options spread all over the place. Fortunately, CardScan has placed most of the commonly used features on easily accessible buttons. The main one you need is the Scan button. This prepares the scanner, and all you need to do is push a card through it face-down. No processing is done at this point, so you can keep feeding cards through until your desk is clear.

If you're planning to categorise your contacts, it's best to sort your cards into the relevant categories first. You can then use the Batch processing option to put all your scans into a category automatically, which will save a lot of time later on.

Once you've finished scanning, all you have to do is click the Process button. This scours

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the scanned images and pulls out all the text. It typically took between three and seven seconds per card on our 1.6GHz Pentium M notebook, so it's quite rapid.

Results were the best we've seen from a card scanner, and there were very few mistakes. It coped with a variety of different cards, inserted at different angles and orientations. It also managed to determine correctly where each telephone number should be placed by reading the information on the card. Addresses, company names and actual names were generally formatted well, and the scanner even managed to cope with a card with a coffee stain on it.

Inevitably there were problems, but they tended to be minor ones. One card we scanned used only lower-case characters, so we had to reformat the name and company name. Another card had a graphic for the first letter of the company, which the CardScan software couldn't read.

Fortunately, correcting errors is simple. A scan of the card appears for each record, so you can verify the information. Selecting a field, such as the company name, highlights the relevant part of the card, so it's easy to check the information. It's one of the easiest bits of software we've used to make changes. Finally, you need to select the Verified tick box to confirm the information is correct, so it makes it easier to see which cards still need checking. The information can then be synchronised with Outlook, Lotus Notes, Act! or a range of other common applications.

PlusTek's OptiCard 820 is £50 cheaper, but it's harder to use, not as quick and isn't as accurate. For getting business cards on your PC, CardScan's Personal does an excellent job.