Discuss: NeatDesk for Mac - sheetfed scanner Series Sign in to comment. Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic. We delete comments that violate our policy, which we encourage you to read. Apr 11, 2016  NeatDesk for PC and Mac is a desktop scanner and digital filing system that lets you scan and organize receipts, business cards and documents. Neat's patented Text Recognition technology identifies and extracts the important information and automatically organizes it for you. Sep 22, 2011  NeatDesk Scanner and Digital Filing System. NeatDesk Desktop Scanner and Digital Filing System For Mac & PC with Gabrielle. NeatDesk Desktop Scanner and Digital Filing System.

• Neatdesk For Mac Reviews
• Neatdesk For Mac Best Buy
• How To Install Neat Scanner
• Neatdesk For Mac Installation Instructions

Desk clutter is one of those unfortunate facts of life that everybody has to learn to manage and cope with. Massive piles of invoices, receipts, and business cards can be overwhelming, and finding a good solution can be taxing. Fortunately, Neat has a great product that, at least for me, helped tremendously as I dealt with this daunting task. But does the NeatDesk for Mac truly deliver? Read on to find out my thoughts.

Overview

The NeatDesk for Mac ($399.95, Neat Co, Purchase) aims to provide a solution for managing your desk clutter by allowing you to quickly and efficiently digitize all of your receipts, documents, and even business cards, while the included NeatWorks for Mac software interprets the documents that you scan through it, as well as acting as a database to help you store and later recall your important papers.

The included NeatWorks for Mac software worked extremely well. It was able to read names, addresses, phone numbers and other data from my documents, and was even able to fairly accurately read and catalogue entire sentences found on large paper documents.

Initial Thoughts

Straight out of the box, I was immediately impressed with both the appearance and durability of the NeatDesk. It’s very solidly constructed, made of high quality plastics that are not easily damaged, and has a solid heft – a good indication that it was built with quality.

I found the NeatDesk to be extremely easy to use – once it was set up, which takes only about 10-15 minutes, the only thing left to do is to feed all of your documents, receipts, and business cards through it, and then check to make sure that the NeatWorks software is properly reading and cataloguing your papers. The vast majority of the work is done automatically!

Design/Style

As far as aesthetics are concerned, the NeatDesk for Mac does not disappoint. It almost looks like something that Apple would design, with its rounded corners and obvious emphasis on style. I particularly love how the blue light on the front of the machine pulses in such an inviting manner.

In addition to the physical appearance of the product, however, the design of the NeatDesk for Mac also reflects that a great amount of careful thought and consideration went into its design – the device is smooth to use, and never feels cumbersome, or like it tries to get in your way.

The unit features a removable slot that lets you feed documents, receipts, and business cards through it all at the same time, and the front plastic panel folds down, revealing a ridge that catches your papers as they come through the scanner. When you’re finished scanning your papers, the entire thing folds back up into a stylish and compact shape that just happens to look great on your desk.

Neatdesk For Mac Reviews

Performance

When I first received this unit, I swiftly unpacked it and proceeded to follow the directions to get it working on my Mac. The setup procedure is very simple, and I was up in running in no time. I scanned my first document – A grocery. It looked great, and the built-in OCR detected all of the text, and automatically created a database entry using the total price, and the items purchased.

I then scanned a full-sized invoice – and achieved a similar result, with the only concern being that the scanner slightly cut the sides off of the document. This effect was lessened significantly when I fed the invoice through a second time, and when I fed an additional invoice through the NeatDesk, the scanner worked flawlessly, and did not cut anything off at all.

When working with various documents that use different fonts, the NeatDesk did make a few mistakes, skipping a word here or there and sometimes inputting the wrong word, but I found that as I continued to use the device, it was able to learn from the documents it had already processed in order to reduce the number of mistakes that it made.

NeatWorks For Mac

The included NeatWorks for Mac software is one of the most functional and complete hardware-bundled software solutions that I have ever used – it’s remarkably easy to use, works with scanners other than the NeatDesk (like the Fujitsu ScanSnap series), and is able to analyse, interpret, and convert your data into searchable and editable text quickly, efficiently, and with fewer mistakes than most OCR programs that I’ve used.

The design of the software is also compelling – both visually and functionally, NeatWorks for Mac is powerful, easy to use, and reliably got the job done every time, with very minimal intervention on my part. If I could describe NeatWorks using just one word, that word would be “polished.”

A Few Concerns

While the vast majority of my experiences with the NeatDesk for Mac were positive and rewarding, I did encounter a few points of concern. First, if NeatDesk for Mac isn’t already open on your Mac, hitting the scan button on the unit would occasionally launch Preview’s built-in scanning utility instead of opening NeatWorks for Mac. This only happened to me a few times, but did occur often enough to occasionally become annoying.

Second, while I appreciated the included paper insert that allowed me to feed receipts, documents, and business cards all at the same time through pre-sized slots, I was disappointed more than once that it wasn’t able to hold more – I was able to fit 12-15 documents, about as many receipts, and about 10-12 business cards into the holding slot all at once. This was fine after I’d already scanned everything into my library and was only using the NeatDesk for “maintenance,” but was frustrating when I was initially feeding all of my hundreds and hundreds of documents, receipts, and business cards through the machine for the first time.

To make the perfect bowl of homemade mac and cheese, you may need a blend of great cheeses, including sharp cheddar. Here are the best melting cheeses for your noodles, with our best recipes for. Cheeses for mac and cheese. 'Got Some Crust' Macaroni and Cheese 'Finally, the mac and cheese I've been looking for! I don't care for creamy mac and cheese. I left out the hot sauce and was delicious!' Chef John's Macaroni and Cheese. See how to make this classic baked mac and cheese. Restaurant-Style Mac and Cheese. Oct 01, 2019  This baked mac and cheese is a family favorite recipe, loved by both children and adults. It uses a combination of cheeses, layered in the dish as well as. Apr 22, 2016  Not all cheeses are meant for mac & cheese, though. It’s all about getting the right ratio of the melters and the flavor-enhancers. Some cheeses get all gooey, others liquify into cream,.

Another concern that I had is that NeatDesk didn’t do a very good job of handling documents that contained columns, reading across the entire page when inputting my data into its database rather than reading column-by-column, however, in Neat’s defense, I’ve not yet seen any scanner software able to do this. Further, again as I somewhat expected, the NeatDesk occasionally had difficulty processing highly graphical business cards.

Verdict

Overall, I was very impressed with both the NeatDesk for Mac and its included NeatWorks software, and found that, while it sometimes took a while for the software to “learn” how to most accurately process your documents, the machine performed extremely well once it was established.

The NeatDesk for Mac and its companion software stand as examples of excellent, easy to use, attractive and intelligently designed products that do their job as well as I’ve ever seen a solution do straight out of the box, and while I did run into a few minor snags, my overall experience with the NeatDesk for Mac was exceptionally positive.

All things considered, I was very impressed with the NeatDesk for Mac, and found it to be an extremely valuable to to help me stay organized and be more productive, and I was very impressed with the design and build quality of the unit.

Rating & Information

Rating: [rating:4]

While the NeatDesk for Mac is certainly a well-designed, durable, and high-quality product, I was nevertheless slightly disappointed that it didn’t work perfectly with its software 100% of the time (occasionally launching the scanning utility included with OS X). Further, I occasionally found myself wishing it could hold more paper that it actually does, and I was quite disappointed at its lack of ability to handle documents with columns. Below, please find a list of the pros and cons that I encountered:

Pros:

• Durable and professional, and provides excellent performance.
• OCR text recognition worked very well.
• Reasonably priced in comparison to other similar scanners.
• Beautiful machine looks great on desk.
• Well-designed.

Cons:

• Can take a while for NeatWorks to “learn” your documents.
• Cannot handle documents with columns.
• The driver seemed to have occasional issues, launching OS X’s scanning utility rather than NeatWorks.
• Included paper tray could be larger.

Taking all these things into account, I award the NeatDesk for Mac 4 out of 5 stars, because while it did excel at its task most of the time, there were just enough glitches and disappointments for me to occasionally become frustrated with the unit. I feel that I could strongly recommend the NeatDesk for Mac to most business-oriented consumers, or to anyone who need a little extra help to stay organized. For more information, or to purchase the NeatDesk for Mac ($399.95), visit Neat’s product page on the web.

As mentioned in my NeatDesk review, Neatco sent me a review copy of their NeatDesk For Mac scanner. I liked the scanner, but even more so I liked the NeatWorks software so I decided to do a separate review.

This review is for the NeatWorks for Mac version. I don’t know to what extent the Windows version is different, but hopefully they are similar.

For some reason I don’t quite get, NeatWorks for Mac can be purchased on its own, but NeatWorks for Windows appears to only be available bundled with the NeatDesk or NeatReceipts scanner. Kinda wacky.

Installing

Before plugging in the scanner, I installed the software by popping in the CD. It installed like most any other program, and when it first ran, it prompted me to update which I did. I’m now running Version 2.1.4 (214017).

When it first ran, the first thing it did was notice that I was running ScanSnap Manager and asked me if I wanted to configure the ScanSnap to send scans into NeatWorks. Hmm, interesting. I’ll save that one for another post.

Running The First Time

The first time you run it, it takes you to a welcome screen. I found the video tour very helpful, so I recommend that for sure.

Libraries & Collections

With NeatWorks, you can have a number of different Libraries. You can think of a Library as a top-level repository. You can either just put everything into one Library, or have say a Business Library, a Personal Library, etc.

A collection is a group within one particular Library. By default, NeatWorks creates a Contacts, Receipts, and Documents Collection. You can add whatever Collections makes sense to you (Bills? Automotive?).

Scanning Options

There are a bunch of options you can set when you want to scan into NeatWorks.

You can do B&W or Color, have the scanned items go into your Inbox, the Current Collection, you’re working with, or straight to a PDF.

You can have a separate item for each page, or have it all-in-one, and you can choose Single Sided or Double Sided.

You can have NeatWorks analyze (more on that later) the whole document, just the first page or not at all.

Processing

When you bring something into the NeatWorks Inbox, it analyzes it to try to find what kind of document it is. It tries to see if it is a Document, a Receipt, or a Contact (Business Card).

It then tries to analyze the content and see if it can fill in some of the (configurable) fields for you. For example, here is a receipt that I scanned in. Some of the fields auto-populated.

With business cards, it did quite a good job of picking out the company and contact information and auto-filling the fields.

Obviously, it’s not going to get everything. When that is the case, it has a wicked feature whereby you can drag OCR’ed text from the document into one of the fields. In this example, I dragged the store name to the Vendor field:

It’s not perfect, but it is a big time saver.

Document Management

From the Inbox, you can edit the information for each item and drag and drop them to the appropriate collection. You can crop, split pages, and (handy) can combine multiple documents into one.

The files are stored in the Library, which on OSX is a package that is saved by default in your ~/Documents directory.

If you Show Package Contents, you can see the individual PDFs in there, and from NeatWorks you can export any or all files to PDF, CSV, or Quicken.

Especially, when you are working or doing something on your PC (computer).Then you should install WeChat on your PC. Wechat for mac old version.

I know some people will not like having their documents stored in this proprietary NeatWorks library file. It’s up to you whether that is an issue or not.

Searching

There are multiple ways that you can search for information. You can type in the Search box and that will search through fields and OCR’ed text in the current Library.

You can hit the Browse button and browse by any of the fields associated with your items. For example, say you knew the rough date. You could browse like this:

NeatWorks also has a nifty “ScreenFlow” mode that shows your documents in a CoverFlow-like view:

Finally, it integrates with Spotlight. So, on the Mac, you can do a search for any of the text inside your document and it will bring it up in NeatWorks:

Printing To NeatWorks

In addition to manually importing or scanning, there is another cool way to add things to NeatWorks. Say you’ve received an email receipt and you want to save it. The program adds some options in the Print To PDF menu:

You can tell it if it is a Document, a Contact, or A Receipt right from your email program (or wherever) and it imports it, OCRs it, and Analyzes it. Awesome.

What Could Be Improved?

Nothing’s perfect and NeatWorks is no exception. The first issue is the speed. When you scan something, it starts the OCR and Analyze process right away. This can be somewhat slow (as with any OCR), and there is a lot of chugging along if you are scanning a bunch of documents. It would be great if you could batch-OCR later.

Also, it would be great if there was the concept of “Profiles”, so that you could have some predefined groups of settings that you could more easily flip back and forth between.

The Bottom Line

I am very impressed with Neatco’s NeatWorks. In a separate post, I will be exploring how to make the two worlds collide and use NeatWorks with the ScanSnap. Stay tuned.

Have you used NeatWorks? What did you think of it?

Neatdesk For Mac Best Buy

How To Install Neat Scanner

Download Your Paperless Cheat Sheet

Neatdesk For Mac Installation Instructions

I've been going paperless since 2008, and have tried it all. I've collected my best resources (hardware and software) into this free cheat sheet.

Enter your email to let me know where to send it, and I'll get it to you right away.

You'll also receive paperless tips every two weeks via the very popular Paper Cuts. I value your privacy and your information is never shared with anyone.