PaperPort Deluxe 8 as a personal information manager and simple intranet

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2002. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

I have been using PaperPort for some time as a method of organising my usually chaotic paperwork. Many practices may have some experience of it, as quite a few used it as a step in scanning prior to the new scanning module.

It started as a blank page that documents could be scanned onto and has over the years developed and added useful functions. Documents appear on the page as thumbnails so you can see what they contain, and you can name and date them to help find them later. Each item can have multiple pages and, if wanted, several documents can be stacked into one pile. There is also a built-in search facility.

You can also select PaperPort as a printer from any Windows application, so that you can print a document to it rather than paper. I find this very useful while surfing the web when I want to record something for later recall. I also use it instead of printing out sheets from Excel that may change with time but where I want to keep a record of what it was on one particular day. PaperPort can cope with all sorts of file types - TIFF, JPEG, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets etc - and you can view them through its built-in viewer or open them in their own program.

You can set up multiple blank pages called folders, which you can name and group relevant documents in. I have one for tax-related documents, one for NICE guidelines, one with pictures of my family etc. The latest release, version 8, has developed this and you can have as many folders as you like; indeed you can add existing folders as PaperPort folders and access them through PaperPort.

Even better, you can now access networked drives. This means at work you can use PaperPort as the front end for an intranet. On our Emis NT fileserver there is a directory called “shared” that everyone can access, and each individual also has a private directory that only they can. We have set up a directory in shared called “intranet” and have sub-folders similar to the structure suggested by the NUG. We have important documents saved in the appropriate directories, and previously people had to brave the Windows file explorer to find them. I have private documents stored in my private directory on the server. Now I have PaperPort set up on my machine to access both of these.

The only drawback is cost; while at £50 each it is very affordable for personal use, if each desktop is to have one then it can add up. However, as explained, the files can be accessed through the normal file system, and it is cheaper than some products available.