OmniPage

OmniPage did a poor job converting this list of Bernie Madoff's customers with the software's default setting. But because the document was so uniform, quickly defining and applying a template resulted in a spreadsheet that looked identical to the original PDF.

OmniPage had no trouble with these scanned memos from the Obama-Biden transition team, flawlessly recognizing the text despite a variety of different scan qualities.

It took an hour or so, but OmniPage is the only software we've tested to date that converted this 1,000-page PDF of border fence contributors into a spreadsheet -- reproducing the original almost perfectly. Its OCR feature was even able to handle the weird font that's consistently foiled other programs.

OmniPage's guesswork on the formatting of this PDF database report will only go so far toward converting the document into a sortable table. But a little manual help from the user before the conversion saves hours of data wrangling later and results in a perfect table.

OmniPage Pro whipped through these transcripts from combatant tribunals fast, recognizing the text in all but a few areas with lower quality scans.

Processing these scanned disclosure forms from North Carolina legislators is time-consuming with OmniPage, and although it recognized most of the text accurately, a software hangup prompted by this 1,700-page file made the results more difficult to wrangle.

Although it does give users some ability to customize the results of the spreadsheets it outputs, OmniPage's options aren't much help when it comes to making sense of this unlined PDF of Clinton administration political appointments. Results would take a long time to clean up without programming knowledge.