Fax Modems Make Things Easier--Most of the Time

Fax modems are an invention right up there in handiness with hair spray and wrinkle-free pants. They send and receive faxes, and they work like regular modems to make the online service or Internet connection possible.

While not always an ideal replacement for a fax machine, fax modems and software have gotten a lot easier to use and more reliable over the last year. They are now the best choice if you mostly send documents already inside your PC and don’t receive that many faxes.

No more walking over to the fax machine, putting a document in, dialing the number and standing there until the transmission ends. When you send or receive a fax on your PC, the fax software program does the work. It can change a document, work sheet or picture that’s in your PC into a format that fax machines and other PCs equipped with fax modems understand. Documents faxed directly from a PC look better too.

With a fax modem, you simply print the document. But instead of selecting your printer from within the application you’re working in (such as Word, Excel or Quickbooks), you select the fax modem as your printer. In a flash, your fax software pops up on the screen; you then select the recipient from your fax phone book, or even from your contact management software program’s database.

The fax software automatically makes a cover sheet, dials the number and sends the fax. If the recipient’s fax line is busy, most fax software programs will try three times before giving up.

However, if you want to send a document that you did not create with your computer, such as a handwritten list, it’s a bummer. You need another piece of gear called a scanner. A scanner, which works much like a copy machine, takes a picture of something and saves it inside your computer as a file, which you can then send with your fax modem. Doing all this just to fax a piece of paper defeats the purpose.

When someone sends something to your fax-equipped PC, the fax modem automatically answers the phone, receives the fax and stores it on your computer’s hard disk. You can read the fax on-screen or print it out. The downside: Received faxes devour hard disk space, and your PC has to be powered up to receive faxes. If you’re working in an application, you can tell when you’re receiving a fax. Your system will slow down considerably.

You can, however, schedule a single fax, or broadcast fax to several recipients, to be sent automatically in the wee hours of the morning, when telephone charges are lower. A fax log tracks the faxes sent and received and includes the total number of pages, the recipient’s or sender’s name, total transmission time and more details.

Almost all fax modems include bare-bones software. Even Windows 95 comes with Microsoft Fax. But if your needs move beyond the basic send, receive and scheduling functions, it’s time to spend money and get a real fax software program.

WinFax Pro 7.5 (Symantec, [800] 441-7234, $129) leads the fax software pack. Frankly, there isn’t another such program with more features geared specifically to professionals. For starters, it includes optical character recognition, or OCR, which converts faxes received into an editable file. It comes in real handy if someone sends you a fax that needs editing or annotations.

If you use a contact management program such as Act!, Ecco Pro, Janna or Maximizer, WinFax can use the data for its fax phone book directly from the programs. WinFax Pro also lets you send faxes via the Internet and automatically forward faxes to wherever you’ll be, or remotely retrieve them from wherever you end up.

The built-in TalkWorks software also turns your computer into an answering machine, though it’s not worth the trouble. Also, be careful about the RAM requirements. The publisher says you only need 8 megabytes, but you really need at least 16.

No matter which fax software program you use, make sure you customize the canned cover sheets included with the program. Remember to sign your faxes just like you would a letter. Getting your signature on faxes sent with your PC is easy. The simplest way is to use a scanner. Simply sign your name on a blank sheet of paper with a fine felt-tip pen. Make your signature twice as large as it is normally. This makes it easier to resize the signature without distorting it later.

Then, save your signature as an image file--a .BMP, .GIF, .TIF or .WMF. You might have to use a drawing program to clean up the scan. The finished signature can be used in your documents or another software program. Just use the program’s “import picture” feature.

If you don’t have a scanner handy but do have access to a fax machine, as well as have fax software with OCR, you can do the job another way. Set your fax software to receiving mode. Next, set the fax machine to fine resolution and fax the page with your signature from the fax machine to your PC. After your computer receives your signature, save the page as a .PCX file.

Next, open the saved page in a drawing program. Clean up any rough spots and stray dots around the signature. Now, rather than saving the entire page, use the “crop” tool to cut out just the signature; save just this cutout as either a .PCX or a .BMP file.