Abstract
Different fax applications vary widely in their complexity, features, and cost -- so much so that we can't begin to cover them all. Instead, this chapter covers several different ways to send a fax and explores what you can do with incoming faxes.
The ability to fax documents has become an important part of doing business and managing your personal affairs. Even people who don’t have e-mail addresses may have access to a fax machine, giving you a way to get information to them quickly.
Several different fax programs are compatible with Microsoft Outlook. In some cases, special fax software is installed on your computer and the outgoing faxes are created on your own system. In other situations, a separate fax server takes your documents and turns them into faxes, without the need for specific fax software on your computer. These different fax applications vary widely in their complexity, features and costs — so much so that we can’t begin to cover them all here.
Instead, we cover several different ways to send a fax and explore what you can do with incoming faxes. After some general pointers, we look at a few of the specifics involved in using Microsoft Fax, which is included with Windows 95.
SENDING FAXES
Depending on the fax program you have, you may be able to use any of these methods for sending a fax:
compose a fax using special software that allows you to pick from available cover pages and set other fax-specific properties
print from any Windows program to a special fax printer driver
compose an e-mail message, with or without attached documents, and send it to fax recipients
scan a document into a format that can be sent as a fax using one of the above methods
In general, you need to have Outlook loaded before you can send a fax. If you invoke one of these methods and Outlook isn’t yet loaded, Outlook usually starts up on its own.
Using Special Fax Software
Microsoft Fax, Personal Fax for Windows NT, and WinFax PRO 8.0 (see Figure 13.1) are all examples of fax software that you install on your own computer. They turn your messages and documents into faxes locally, on your system, rather than sending them off to a separate server for processing. Even when you are using Microsoft Fax or WinFax PRO with a network fax server, the actual creation of the fax is done on your local machine.
Special Note: For best results with WinFax PRO 8.0, connect to the http://www.symantec.com site and get the LiveUpdate, which adds greater compatibility with Outlook. WinFax PRO 7.0 and earlier WinFax versions are not compatible with Outlook.
Typically, sending a fax with special fax software involves five steps, though the order may vary:
Select one or more addresses from the Address Book or enter one-time addresses.
Select a cover page and add any notes that you want to appear there.
Select a time for sending the fax. (Sending during a discounted rate period is a frequent choice.)
Specify any files that you want to send as part of the fax.
Create the fax and send it.
When the fax is created, the cover page and any attached documents are converted from their native format into a graphic representation, using standards set for fax transmissions. Then, a call is made to the receiving fax machine. When the receiving machine answers, the transmission begins. If a connection can’t be made, the fax program either tries again or notifies you that there is a problem. Depending on the program, you may also get a notification message when the fax transmission is successful, or you may be able to view a log of fax activities.
Printing to a Fax Printer Driver
Many fax programs recognize that it is not always possible to send a document as an attached file. Therefore, they offer another method that works with any Windows application — printing to a special fax printer driver. Click Start, Settings, Printers to see whether any fax printer drivers are installed on your machine. If you have problems getting a particular type of document to fax as an attachment, send it by printing to the fax printer driver instead.
The steps involved in using a fax printer driver are as follows:
Print the document to the fax printer driver.
Select one or more addresses from the Address Book or enter one-time addresses.
Select a cover page and add any notes that you want to appear there.
Select a time for sending the fax.
Create the fax and send it.
Figure 13.2 shows an example using the LanFax printer driver, available at http://www.alcom.com.
Using E-mail Message Methods
Outlook treats a fax as a special type of e-mail message. This means that you can create a fax by composing an e-mail message and attaching files, then sending it to any of the fax addresses in your Address Book. Text that you type in the body of the message usually appears as a cover page note or as a separate page after the cover page.
The steps involved are as follows:
Compose a new message, including text and file attachments.
Select one or more addresses from the Address Book or enter one-time addresses.
Select a cover page and add any notes that you want to appear there.
Select a time for sending the fax.
Send the message.
Special Note: Not all fax programs can recognize Outlook Contacts fax numbers as fax addresses. You may sometimes need to create an additional e-mail address for a recipient, using a special entry type for your fax software.
One advantage of creating a fax in this way is that you can mix e-mail and fax addresses when you compose a message.
For many high-end fax applications that connect directly to an Exchange server, the e-mail message method is the normal way of creating a fax. These programs render the cover page and documents into fax format on the separate fax server, rather than on your own computer.
The newest way to send faxes via e-mail is through special gateways on the Internet, many of which can even render documents as faxes. Some of these gateways are commercial services, while others offer free faxing under certain conditions. Useful reviews of the available services can be found at http://www.northcoast.com/savetz/fax-faq.html and http://www.netpower.no/frost/fax.
Creating a Fax with a Scanner
In an office with a traditional fax machine, it’s common to take a stack of existing documents from a file and fax the originals by feeding them through the machine. Can the same thing be done if your only fax machine is your computer? The answer is a definite “yes,” as long as you have a scanner.
In this situation, the scanner does the job of turning the paper documents into images that can be faxed. Depending on your scanner, scanner software, and fax software, you’re likely to be able to use either of these methods:
scan directly to a fax printer driver
scan to an .awd (Microsoft Fax), .tif (Tagged Image File Format), or other graphic format that your fax software can handle as a file attachment
WORKING WITH INCOMING FAXES
Incoming faxes are stored as image files and either routed directly to your Inbox or stored in a central location, such as an Exchange Server public folder, a Microsoft Mail shared folder, or a system folder on a network drive.
A fax may appear in your Inbox with a special icon; if so, you can double-click it to view the fax. In other cases, the fax may appear as an attachment to a regular e-mail message; you need to right-click the message, then choose View Attachments.
The most common fax formats are .awd (Microsoft Fax), .tif (Tagged Image File Format) and .dcx (multi-page fax). Your fax software package should include a viewer to view one or more types of faxes. For example, the Microsoft Fax software that comes with Windows 95 includes a Fax Viewer program. This program can be replaced with the +Imaging for Windows program from Eastman Software, which adds support for annotations and saving as a .tif file. We look at both of these later in this chapter.
As with any other messages, you can print and forward incoming faxes. You can also apply rules to them with the Rules Wizard and move them to other folders. In general, you can also reply to faxes, but you should check the specifics of the fax address in the reply. The reply address probably uses the fax number or other identifier from the sending fax machine, but this may not be the complete number that you need to use to send a fax with your particular fax software.
Additional software can provide one special action for incoming faxes — optical character recognition (OCR), the conversion of a fax image to a text or word processing document. Virtually any OCR package can read a .tif file. Several also read .awd (Microsoft Fax) files and have relatively tight integration with Outlook. These are listed under “For More Information” at the end of the chapter.
USING MICROSOFT FAX
Now that you have a general idea of how Outlook sends and receives faxes, let’s look at the particulars of the Microsoft Fax service. As noted in Chapter 7, you must have Microsoft Fax installed and working before you install Outlook.
In this section, we cover how to use the Cover Page Editor, send and receive faxes with Microsoft Fax, and troubleshoot common problems.
Special Note: Unlike many fax programs, Microsoft Fax does not put a banner across the top of each faxed page giving the sender, destination, and page number. This makes it doubly important that you either include a cover page or add information to your document that identifies the sender and recipient.
Using the Cover Page Editor
If you do much faxing, you’ll probably want to create your own fax cover page, perhaps with your company logo. Included with Microsoft Fax is the right tool for the job, the Cover Page Editor, and four sample cover pages to get you started. You can change one of those pages or start your own cover page from scratch.
You can launch the cover page Editor from the Start menu or from within Outlook:
From the Start menu, choose Programs, Accessories, Fax, Cover Page Editor to open the Cover Page Editor to a new, blank cover page.
From within Outlook, choose Tools, Microsoft Fax Tools, Options. In the Microsoft Fax Properties dialog box (Figure 13.3), either select a cover page and click Open, or click New to start a fresh cover page.
I recommend that you start by editing an existing cover page. You save a lot of time this way, because most of the information you need will already be on the page. After you open a cover page but before you make changes, you should save the document under a new file name so you can use the original cover page again. In Figure 13.4, we’ve opened the Generic cover page, then used File, Save As to make a copy called New Generic, which is the one we’re going to edit.
The cover page in Figure 13.4 may look complicated, but it really consists of three basic elements:
Text boxes that contain information about the sender, the recipient, or the message itself. These field names are enclosed in curly braces (e.g., {Sender’s Company}).
Plain text boxes, such as the letters F, A, and X that spell out FAX at the top.
Graphics, such as the black ellipse at the top or the horizontal line.
All the tools you need are on the Style toolbar and the Drawing toolbar. You can hide either toolbar by unchecking it on the View menu.
Table 13.1 lists the toolbar controls and their functions.
The Cover Page Editor includes an Undo function. You can choose Edit, Undo or press Ctrl+Z to undo a series of actions, one by one.
Inserting Information Boxes
One of the most important reasons to use a cover page is to display information — name, company, phone number, and so on — about the fax recipient or yourself. For recipients, this information is extracted from the entry in the Contacts folder or Personal Address Book. Details about yourself come from the information entered on the User tab of the Microsoft Fax Properties dialog box (see “Editing User Information” in Chapter 7).
To add a field to the cover page to show information about yourself, your recipient, or the message itself, follow these steps:
Use the scroll bars on the Fax Cover Page Editor window to position the cover page so the place where you want the new field to appear is roughly in the center of the screen.
Choose Insert, then pick a Recipient, Sender, or Message field from the list of information fields shown in Table 13.2.
The field and a plain text box with the title of the field will be inserted in the middle of the displayed portion of the cover page. Position the pointer over the field and text box so that it shows a four-sided arrow, then click the mouse and drag the new elements to where you want them to be on the cover page.
All the Recipient fields except To: List and CC: List are drawn from information in the Contacts folder or the Personal Address Book entry for the recipient. If you don’t plan to fill in some fields, don’t put them on your cover page.
The To: List and CC: List fields show the names of all the people to whom a particular fax was sent — including any e-mail recipients. (One of Outlook’s great features is that you can use a single message to send a document to a variety of people, some via fax and others via e-mail.)
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