ABBYY Announces the First Scan Conversion Utility, ScanTo Office; One-Step Conversion from Scanned Image Files to Microsoft Office Documents.

FREMONT, Calif. -- ABBYY USA, a leader in intelligent document recognition and linguistic technologies, today announced the availability of ABBYY ScanTo Office(TM), an efficient, moderately-priced scan conversion utility that turns paper documents into editable Microsoft Word and Excel files, or into e-mail attachments.

With a single mouse click, ABBYY ScanTo Office allows users to easily complete conversion processes from scanners or image files to Microsoft Office applications including Word, Excel, and Outlook without the unwieldiness of launching a separate application. ScanTo Office is for people who want to quickly unlock and repurpose information from paper or image files into Microsoft applications while maintaining the look and feel of originals and without having to retype or reformat.

"We created ScanTo Office for users that want a streamlined, nuts and bolts way to scan documents directly into Microsoft applications," said ABBYY USA President and CEO, Dean Tang. "There's a population of users who want to convert their paper documents into other applications, but who don't necessarily need all the functionality of a premium OCR package to do so; they want to transform their scanned files without retyping, and they want to do it at an affordable price."

Highlighted Features and Benefits of ABBYY ScanTo Office

--Ease-of-Use -- A single mouse-click starts the scanning and conversion process and gets editable files in the intended applications.

--Integration with Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook -- Users are able to access the utility and scan directly from within these applications -- no need to launch a separate scanning and recognition application.

--Convert Image Files with a single mouse click; from Windows Explorer, users can quickly convert image files on their hard drive with a right-mouse click.

--Intuitive Scan Wizard -- An easy-to-use wizard guides users through the simple steps of scanning or image conversion.

--WYSIWYG -- What-you-scan-is-what-you-get with ScanTo Office as it re-creates editable documents in Microsoft Word or Excel with the same look and feel as the original document, retaining graphics, tables, columns and fonts.

--37 Languages -- Reads documents in 37 languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish; in addition, it reads bi-lingual documents by allowing users to select a secondary language.

--Book Scanning -- Users have the option to scan opposing sides of a book as ScanTo Office automatically splits the pages.

System Requirements

--PC with Intel Pentium/Celeron/Xeon, AMD K6/Athlon/Duron or compatible processor 200 MHz or higher.

--Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0 (SP6 or later), Windows Me/98 (To work with localized interfaces, corresponding language support in required.)

--64MB RAM for Windows XP/2000/NT 4.0 or 32 MB for Windows Me/98. In multiprocessor systems, an additional 16MB RAM is required for each additional processor.

--150MB hard disk space for program installation and 70 MB for program operation.

--TWAIN compatible scanner, digital camera or fax modem.

--SVGA video card and monitor (minimum resolution 800x600 pixels).

Pricing and Availability

ABBYY ScanTo Office is available now with a suggested retail price of $49.99. The company also has a trial version at www.abbyyusa.com. For more product or company information, visit www.abbyyusa.com, e-mail [e-mail] or call 510-226-6717.

About ABBYY USA

ABBYY USA is a member of the ABBYY Software House Group, a world leader in document recognition and linguistic technologies. ABBYY specializes in the development of software for optical character recognition (OCR), intelligent character recognition (ICR), linguistics, semantics, and electronic lexicography. Leading products from ABBYY include the FineReader line of OCR, ICR and barcode software, and FineReader development tools. Companies that license ABBYY OCR/ICR technologies include Banctec, BenQ, EMC2/Documentum, EPSON, Freedom Scientific, Kurzweil, Kofax, Lexmark, Microtek, NewSoft, Notable Solutions, Panasonic, ReadSoft, SER Solutions, Samsung Electronics, Sumitomo Electric Systems, Stellent, Toshiba and Verity. For more information about ABBYY, visit: www.abbyyusa.com or contact ABBYY USA, 47221 Fremont Boulevard, Fremont, CA 94538. Phone: [phone]. Fax: [phone]. E-mail: [e-mail].