Comments on: Review: NeatDesk and NeatWorks for Mac

By: George Zraick

George Zraick — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:27:57 +0000

Nice Idea but in my experience the company is working in a vacuum. The software work fine if installed on a system that doesn’t have anything else installed on it.
In a real world desk top (mine for example) I have a HP all-in-one, Efax, and other utility’s along with Quicken installed, This system has work well for 2 years until I installed neat products. ” It crashed the system” and I spent the weekend rebuilding it because no and I mean NO Support. On Monday when I called, I got BS deflection and was told to contact them on the web to get a voice call. lol
When I here stuff like that I know I’m dealing with a disorganized company where a department is under staffed and overwhelmed (Support). Of course the other departments have a “It’s not my problem additude” so once again a great idea that is fubar-ed by poor company culture.

By: JP

JP — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 15:21:21 +0000

I just returned to Neat my NeatWorks for Mac after a week of trial.
I used it with my ScanSnap, a very fine and easy configuration step by step (one minute) is needed to work with NeatWorks, you can print this configuration.
I was interested only by the Receipts side of the soft.
I ill not describe the normal problems due to Receipts too small, difficult to read due to damaged or old thermo printed receipts. Just after the scan a feature “Inspector” help to manually correct the data it is perfect.
NeatWorks comes with fields which are useless and you can not change them. There is however a menu to change what they call Field and Label but they do not precise a definition of what they call Field or Label. Anyway I tried to eliminate or modify the database and try eliminate useless line like: Sent.. Sale taxes.. GST/HST or PST/QST Canadian taxes…Due date.. (strange for a receipt)etc On the other hand I did not find the mandatory fields needed when you travel: City/Location, State/Country, Currency (I do not mind to calculate the change myself manually)
I asked Support to help me and they did answer me correctly but I understood that the Receipt database is based on Vendors and the field/label can not be edited.
I am traveling constantly and collect thousands of receipts not all reimbursable. So to remember a Hotel in China, a taxi company in Morocco, names of hundred of restaurants, markets, pharmacy is useless, I will never go back to these Vendors! I think the NeatWorks Receipt DataBase should be under Category. Each of us has a list of Category to sort at the tax time or when you have to create a bill to be reimbursed by a client.
My conclusion is: if you travel extensively and really need a Receipts Software to sort thousands of receipts made in different Countries or State, this NeatWorks needs a lot of changes before using it. On top, you can not reach the Support by phone, the help online is not very precise and you are going to feel lonely in front of beautiful scans but useless for serious sorting.
Now if you stay in the same place all year long, going to the same Vendors, to do the same transaction, then this soft is for you.
JP

By: Wixon

Wixon — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:39:26 +0000

User reviews on Amazon said the product doesn’t scan greyscale documents, they won’t even show up, a big negative. True?

By: Bill Alpert

Bill Alpert — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:22:37 +0000

Love the scanner hate the software. Poor interface, slow, and system bogging. OCR rarely maps fields correctly and software doesn’t allow much field definition flexibility. I’d like to know how to use this with Evernote. Can’t get the scanner to work with Mac OSX’s image capture app.

By: Len Rubin

Len Rubin — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:52:19 +0000

Does anyone remember the beloved Visioneer PaperPort? How ’bout InfoLog? Global Village GlobalFAX? Now Software’s Now Up-To-Date? History is littered with great products, that—due to being proprietary—took our time and data with them when they eventually departed the marketplace! No matter how compelling the interface or features set, I’d be more inclined to build something in a more dependable conventional database, like FileMaker. At least I’d rest assured my investment of time and effort and money wouldn’t be lost by an inability to easily and completely migrate all my data down the road.

By: bschulz

bschulz — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:56:51 +0000

Be very cautious before buying this software. It is not going to meet the needs of many people. Too bad they don’t have a trial program. I use a Canon MP830 with Paperport, which works great. The MP830 did seem to work fine with Neatwork also, but Neatworks did not have a way to enable full-duplex on the ADF. After 1 hour, here are my complaints in my refund request email:

* Its buggy, I had to quit the application and restart a couple times to reset the view window after it refused to show the documents in the current collection
* It does not let me set my scanner quality settings – hard drive space is cheap these days, I like high quality.
* It does not allow me to scan both sides of a document. With Paperport, I had two choices: I could either enable full-duplex, or the Paperport dialog would let me scan one side, then flip the document over and scan the other side. Paperport automatically interleaved the pages. This is a show stopper for me.
* It does not correctly identify fields. For example, I tried scanning my Bank Statement (Bank of America), and it made the fields the width of the document and there is no way for me to tell it where the fields are. I was hoping I could drag out the import text areas and it would remember the settings the next time. I could not correctly get the date from the scan. I can scan to PDF for free on the Mac…if I have to type in the meta data, the productivity value of your software just went out the window.
* I created a synchronized collection that automatically creates PDF documents. This is important for me. Unfortunately, your software does not allow me to define the PDF document name template. The name is some really long cryptic name that is unidentifiable. A pretty useless feature. The PDF should be the same as the Title in the metadata.

By: Meg

Meg — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:24:50 +0000

I know a cat with a mustache similar to that, but they named him Groucho.

How does one go about categorizing Groucho, Charlie, and Hitler mustaches?

And oh…about the scanner… questions:

1) How IS the speed of the Neatscan compared to ScanSnap?
2) Does Neatscan duplex?
3) How well does Neatscan work for magazine articles? Newspaper articles?
4) Will either one of these scanners allow me to convert my hundreds of photographs to jpegs? If not, do you have a link to something that does the job well? Or is it best to use a service?

I LOVE this site!! Even if I’m not completely uncluttered yet (there is MORE than a week to my uncluttering needs, because I do not have enough space for “a place for everything and everything in its place”), this is a wonderfully inspirational site and you are a gift from grammar heaven!

By: Leslie

Leslie — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:13:39 +0000

Charlie is adorable!

Is there comparable software for a PC? A couple people mentioned Windows in their comments, but I couldn’t tell if they were talking about a version of this software or something else.

By: Orlando

Orlando — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:31:55 +0000

The NeatWorks software has long been superior to ScanSnap’s – the question is how this NeatDesk’s speed compares to the Fujitsu which has seemingly always been faster.

Can you notice a difference in speed?

By: Katie Alender

Katie Alender — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:08:18 +0000

I recently pestered my husband into getting me a ScanSnap for my birthday (I’d been working on him for a year!) and I loooooooooove it so passionately. In addition to how compact and easy to use it is, I love that it will sheetfeed photos and scan them directly into iPhoto as an event.

I am not going to agonize that there is a new and different option out there right now… I’m just not. LOL.

By: Steve-O

Steve-O — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:32:52 +0000

well… this is actually about that cat. Jackson Girl finds Charlie’s mustache very handsome. But she seems to love every male cat she sees…

I wonder if it’s some sort of disguise? Part of his bad-boy mystique?

By: josephine

josephine — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:54:43 +0000

Looks like Costco has a coupon for it on the coupon book that begins 6/15/09, but the website says it’s sold out!!!!

By: Erin Doland

Erin Doland — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:53:01 +0000

@suzanne — We submitted Charlie’s picture years ago and were rejected. They told us that she had a Charlie Chaplin mustache (her namesake), not a Hitler mustache. Picky, picky, picky

By: suzanne

suzanne — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:39:21 +0000

Thanks for the review. Intriguing product/software. I’ll work on rationalizing the expense. But until then, you really need to submit that picture of your cat to:

http://www.catsthatlooklikehit.....igmiaow.pl

By: 10 Interesting Links From June 9th | Greg In The Desert

10 Interesting Links From June 9th | Greg In The Desert — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:02:48 +0000

[...] Review: NeatDesk and NeatWorks for Mac | Unclutterer – A few weeks ago, the Neat company sent me their new NeatDesk for Mac scanner and its NeatWorks software to review. I have been a Fujitsu ScanSnap loyalist for the past two years, so I wasn’t super excited about doing the NeatDesk review. In fact, I tested one of their mobile scanners a year ago and was so disappointed with it that I didn’t even post the review to the site (why clutter up your time with an awful review?). [...]