Computers have revolutionised our lives in so many ways, bringing exciting new digital technologies into our homes and transforming our productivity at work. Just occasionally, however, their limitations become all too apparent. Occasions when old text documents need to be digitised are an example in point.

Converting large, sprawling reports into digital format is a nightmare, but help is at hand in the form of optical character recognition software, or OCR as it is more commonly known. The fact that OCR software can take scanned pages of text and graphics and convert them into editable documents should be manna from heaven – after all, it has the potential to save users hours of tedious typing. The problem is that OCR software has always been a bit hit and miss. One program that promises a breakthrough on the accuracy front, however, is Readiris Pro.

Now in its ninth incarnation, Readiris Pro works by intelligently analysing a scanned document or a PDF file and turning text areas, graphics and information contained in tables into zones. It then converts user-defined selections into editable documents. With 104 languages supported, Readiris can recognise characters from the Cyrillic alphabets and even Chinese character sets. According to the program’s developer, the OCR engine works on a linguistic basis, resolving unclear characters through recognition of the letters surrounding it. The program can also be taught to recognise characters as you use it which improves its accuracy.

So what are the results like? Well, a good way to get started with the program is to use one of the sample documents provided. Load one into the interface, click on the Page Analysis button and select the areas of the document that you wish to convert. This takes a good bit of fiddling because you’ll want to make sure that text documents laid out in several different columns are converted in a logical fashion. When you’re done you select a language, click on the ‘Recognise’ button and let Readiris get on with the character recognition process. Once this has finished you can then open the document in a predetermined word processing package – both Microsoft Word and TextEdit are supported. We were surprised by how good the results were when using the provided sample files; not a single character was out of place and all the text was correctly formatted and presented in the Times typeface.

The Standard edition and the Teacher and Student edition are undoubtedly worth the money. A Professional edition that includes Virtual PC 7 should be out in a few months: since that includes both a Windows licence as well as Virtual PC for roughly £80 more, that will prove even better value than the Standard edition if you need to run PC programs.

But although there are some good, solid improvements over Version X, Office 2004 isn’t totally compelling as an upgrade. Consider your needs carefully to see whether Office meets them – and if they justify spending £200.

It’s Entourage that has had the biggest upgrade. On the email side, it now properly supports Exchange servers, although it lacks all the bells and whistles of Outlook. Demonstrating that at least some parts of Microsoft have a clue about security and spam, there’s support for digital signing and encryption of messages, warnings if applications try to access your address book or send mail, and an automatic block on downloading pictures in HTML email (which you can override). The spam filter remains rubbish, however.

Entourage is also now the home of the ‘Project Center’, a kind of Microsoft Project-lite designed to group emails, contacts, events, tasks, notes and documents related to a particular project. It’s simple and easy to set up, with a Project palette appearing in all the Office programs. Compared to the capabilities of Project, though, it is anaemic; anyone used to Gantt charts will be disappointed. For smaller scale efforts, though, it might prove of use.

More of this kind of integration between the individual programs can be seen in the Scrapbook palette, an improved version of the multiple clipboard feature seen in Office 97 for Windows onwards.

As well as being able to copy into and paste from the scrapbook from any Office application, you can use the scrapbook to paste images, clippings and other files stored in a project’s repository. This is genuinely useful in everyday use.

MSN Messenger is the strange bedfellow to all these Office apps. You’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s nothing new in the version 4.0 supplied with Office 2004. Cosmetically, it’s virtually identical to the current version. But Microsoft intends it to be a vital collaborative tool. Word users can now chat with others about their documents and review changes using Messenger, without having to leave Word; contacts in Entourage all have a Messenger id field and a button for messaging them if they’re online; and the Project Center offers a button for sending shared project files using Messenger. Given the extent of the integration, it seems odd that Messenger doesn’t include any of the collaboration features of its Windows cousins, such as ‘whiteboarding’, but perhaps we should be grateful for the scraps thrown from the Windows banquet table.

Other additions are minor. Smart buttons are a useful little Office-XP acquisition that highlight possible tasks and problems. More Aqua graphics and transparencies are scattered throughout. That embarrassing inability to deal with long filenames has now been expunged. And printing is improved in both Entourage and Excel.

Word has seen more changes. Laptop owners will probably gain the most from the introduction of a new document type: the Word notebook. This is supposedly a way to ‘capture your thoughts and ideas in the equivalent of an electronic notebook’; in non-marketing speak, it’s really an extra template which has a different layout view, and pre-formatted headers and footers to help keep track of your work. What is definitely new is the ability to record notes while you’re typing and have them embed in the Word document.

Although it’s unlikely to be a hit in sales meetings, this feature is bound to be useful to students, particularly in light of the extremely good value of the Teacher and Student edition.

The other big Word-specific addition is a new toolbox palette. This provides access to the built-in thesaurus and Encarta World English Dictionary as well as Microsoft’s online Encarta Encyclopaedia and MSN search engine.

It’s easier to straighten images in Photoshop CS, because the Grid is dispensed in favour of guides. Load an image into Photoshop CS (it works in earlier versions, too), click the ‘View’ menu and make sure the ‘Rulers’ options is selected. Rulers will appear along the top and side of the image window. Click on these and drag over your image to pull down a guide that can be easilyaligned with a straight part of the image.

Getting greater control

For really precise image rotation you’ll need to pick the ‘Custom’ option from the ‘Rotate’ menu. This option allows you to specify how many degrees of rotation are applied and is covered in-depth below.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, at least Microsoft is still developing Mac software. The continuing existence of Office for Mac is perhaps one of the main reasons why the Mac is still a viable business tool: many IT managers would whip every surviving Mac out of their offices if there were no officially endorsed product from Redmond capable of opening Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

It’s not just a tool for opening documents, though – compared to every other productivity suite available for the Mac, Office 2004 is in a class of its own. There are basic word processors, such as Nisus Writer, spreadsheets such as Mesa and even complete office suites such as OpenOffice and (shudder) AppleWorks, but none of them come close to Office 2004 in terms of capabilities, power and ease of use. It really does blow the opposition away. If you’re planning on doing anything more complicated than typing a letter, doing your bills or sending the occasional email, ‘iLife for the Office’, as it should be called, is definitely the package for you.

But if you have a copy of Office already, you’d be forgiven for asking if the £190 upgrade price is justified (everyone else does). Are there enough new features in Office 2004 to justify foregoing that mini iPod? This is where it gets tricky.

While there have been speed and stability improvements to all the four main programs in Office for Mac, only old reliable Word and recent newcomer, Entourage, have seen any real changes. Excel and PowerPoint – the presentation package that has committed more crimes against good design and caused more fatalities at conferences and sales meetings from terminal boredom than any other piece software – are pretty much indistinguishable from their Office X counterparts. They’ve just had a bit of eye candy added.

Look closely at step two and you’ll see we’re using a different colour grid to the default one. That’s because the red grid stands out better on our image. You can adapt the configuration of the grid used to suit the image you are working on by clicking the ‘Photoshop Elements’ menu, scrolling down to ‘Preferences’, ‘Grid’. Now you can change the colour, style and number of lines used on the grid.

Using a Photoshop filter

You can try and fix a wonky image using Photoshop Elements’ ‘Straighten Image’ option. This is a filter that will analyse your image and then attempt to straighten it automatically. By all means try this, but on our experience it rarely gives entirely satisfactory results.

Rotating an image is one of the most common image editing tasks digital photographers have to contend with. Virtually all photos taken in portrait mode have to be rotated after being downloaded from a digicam and it’s often necessary to straighten out the odd wonky shot too. It’s the latter topic that we’ll be focusing on here and for good reason.

Although Photoshop Elements theoretically allows you to straighten images with a single click, this feature does have a tendency to be a bit hit and miss. In order to get precise results you’ll need to do the job manually.

We’ve used Elements in this tutorial, but those with Photoshop 7 or CS have another Levels trick at their disposal – you can save your Levels settings.

This means that if you have a series of photos that need the same colouring – if you’re producing a panorama, for instance – you can do them once, save them and then apply to your other images.

With the ‘Levels’ dialog open, click ‘Save’. Name the setup and click ‘Save’ again. When you want
to load the Levels, click ‘Load’ in the ‘Levels’ dialog

Mixing audio comes down to keyframe control of ‘Level’ and ‘Pan’. While ‘Level’ refers to the volume of your audio, and is therefore easy to understand, the ‘Pan’ settings are a bit more complicated. Essentially though, they control where the sound is. In a mono clip, for instance, you could have the pan adjust the sound of a plane talking off to make it movem from one ear to the other, so it seems like the sound is moving. The ‘3 Band Equalizer’ allows you to take more control of this by adjusting the different frequencies within the audio.