Ask The Readers: Best Windows Document Software?

I have used Rack2filer for several years (came with the Scan Snap S1500 scanner) and appreciated the organization structure hierarchy of Library > Bookcase > Binder > Tabs. It organized my scanned documents very well. However, Rack2 Filer is no longer being offered and supported by Fujitsu as of 2017. When my PC’s hard drive failed, I fortunately had backup my hard drive files on the cloud. However, my Rack2filer files could not be recognized when I reinstalled the program on a new running Windows 10. A call to the Fujitsu a customer support technician fortunately rebuilt my files which took a few hours. Found that backups do not include .ini files and had to be rebuilt. Now I’m looking for document program to replace Rack2 Filer.

I tried the demo of Rack2-Filer v 5.0.

I found it to be too slow to be useful on a 3.2 GHz / 2GB machine. It's a pity, since it's a lovely idea, and it looks nice, and actually looking through the binders is fairly quick and quite intuitive.

Unfortunately, the data import is really slow, taking over a minute to import a few pages of PDF or a dozen JPG files. The thumbnails are small, making it hard to distinguish similar documents from each other – the June power bill, as opposed to the one from May, for example.

Other gripes include nonexistent support for obvious keyboard shortcuts (like "Esc" to exit the viewer application, left/right arrow when viewing files in the Workspace, etc.), horribly slow OCR, pages too small in "regular" mode, no controls in "full screen" mode, etc. Basic page manipulations like shuffling pages around within a binder seem to be difficult or impossible.

Most operations, like adding a divider sheet, are manual, with the program not filling in much metadata for you. It has a sort of "key block" that it tries to pull metadata from, but without any intelligence.

It might work better with a ScanSnap, which does it's own OCR and can put files directly into Rack2. But manipulating them once they're in remains much harder than it should be.

If you would enjoy spending your life organizing your digital documents, you'll like this. If you feel you have better things to do with your time than manipulate digital pages, then find something else. A straight folder structure will be far more efficient than Rack2-Filer.

Hi. I just got an ScanSnap S1500 and am just beginning to dabble in how to organize the scanned documents. So far, i use a folder structure (still evolving), but am thinking OneNote might be handy once i get more familiar with the various options. One challenge is deciding how best to use Acrobat in the process. One PDF containing a year's worth of similar documents is nice, but in other cases a single PDF per document makes sense. It'd be nice to have a file tagging (and search) solution so that physical folder structure is less critical.