Hands on: DevonThink Pro Office 2.2.1

Macworld - Whenever I receive important paperwork, sales receipts or the like, one of the first things I do is scan the paperwork into my MacBook. I lose things easily and I want to refer back to these documents quickly if necessary. As more businesses transition to largely paperless offices, theyll likely seek out Mac programs like DevonThink Professional Office, which makes organizing files and paperless offices obtainable.

DevonThink makes organizing your stuff easier. Between documents, PDFs and smart folders, its easy for a Mac to overflow with information. DevonThink Pro Office uses databases and tags (which we've seen before), to help wrangle all of your files.

Although you can create as many databases as you'd like in DevonThink, I created two for review purposes, a personal and a professional database. I then sorted most of the documents on my Mac accordingly. I imported several important files, documents and PDFs, and let DevonThink do the rest using its default settings.

The primary reason DevonThink can be valuable to paperless offices is its support for OCR, which translates text from scanned documents and PDFs into searchable text. As mentioned earlier, I routinely scan important documents into my Mac, so I was eager to test this feature.

To do so, I imported my original iPhone 3G purchase receipt from 2008 into the application. The iPhone sales receipt includes information such as the street address of the store where I bought the phone, information that exists only on the scanned receipt and not in the file name or tags associated with the document. After importing the receipt into DevonThink, the OCR feature allowed me to search for the street address of the store and the other text on the receipt as well. In subsequent testing the OCR feature worked as advertised.

The OCR feature is huge for offices seeking to go paperless. Assuming many offices do as I do and scan important documents into a hard drive, the ability to create searchable databases of thousands of physical documents is arguably the most important feature of DevonThink. The fact that the feature works as well as it does is equally important to its viability in an office setting.

Tags are also prevalent throughout DevonThink and compliment the OCR scanned documents. The app contains a separate tag browser that makes finding files easier, provided that you tagged them when you imported them, of course. DevonThink also includes a number of smart groups (you can add others, too) for easy reference as well.

One of the DevonThinks other main features is its ability to archive emails through its import program. DevonThink supports Apple Mail 4 (Macworld rated it 4.5 out of 5 mice) and Microsoft Exchange, as well as other popular Unix-based programs such as Mozilla Thunderbird.