Why I love fax/modems; since I work at my computer most of the time, why not keep all my work in it? - Wired! - Column

Home Office Computing, Feb, 1992 by David Hallerman

I've started to use a fax/modem regularly in my work, and I'm convinced that it's one of the mose beneficial, cost-effective, and easy-to-use office technologies around. Fax/ moderms combine a 2400-bps data modem and a 9600-bps fax device. You can sign on to MCI Mail or CompuServe and send electronic mail; send a file straight from your computer to a remote fax machine; or receive a fax transmission in your computer. For $200 to $400, or about $100 more than a plain 2400-bps data modem, you get a lot more functionality.

As with most new technologies, I didn't discover fax/modems until I had a crying need for one. I needed to work at home for nearly a month while our offices were being painted, and I had volunteered to create and distribute press releases for Transportation Alternatives, a New York City advocacy group for ecologically sound means of transportation such as bicycles and mass transti. As I put together a press mailing list for Transportation Alternatives, I discovered that most of the daily, weekly, and monthly newspapers in the New York area, as well as many newspaper reporters themselves, have fax machines.

I found a fax/modem a breeze to set up and use. (I use an external unit with may Macintosh, but MS-DOS units come in both internal and external types.) You control the fax/ modem with its supplied software. Since the software is menu-based, with on-screen prompts and fill-in boxes, you can easily control any fax transaction. To use a data modem (or your fax/modem in data mode), you must open you separate communications program, such as ProComm or MicroPhone. To use most fax/modems, you work straight from your applications program, as follows:

I open my regular application, such as a word processor, to create a document or call up an existing one. Then, I choose the print command--but rather than sending the document to the printer, the computer sends it through the fax/modem, giving me onscreen feedback as I go along. The fax transmission occurs in the background, so I can continue to use the application while faxing occurs. Because I don't have to scan the document as I do with a stand-alone fax, the received document is sharper and easier to read.

SOPHISTICATED OPTIONS

Aside from the time savings--I don't have to print out a document and hand-feed it through a stand-alone fax machine--what I really like about fax/modems is the range of options I'm afforded through a series of dialog boxes. I can enter as many fax numbers as I like, either as a separate procedure or as a simple step just before sending the fax. Similarly, I can create a variety of cover sheets, with graphics such as company logos or personal letterhead, and store them in my computer. Of course, if I hadn't created these graphics with a graphics program, I'd have to scan them into the computer with a scanner.

For broadcast faxing--sending one document to multiple fax machines--I can either select several phone numbers individually, or select a preset group of numbers. For instance, when sending out a press release about our monthly Transportation Alternatives meeting in Brooklyn, I grouped the fax phone numbers for Brooklyn newspapers and gave the release its own cover sheet. Now and in the future, a single click lets me choose that group, separate from all other New York papers, for an automatic fax broadcast. (I was happy to find that newspapers responded to a faxed press release, and several of them printed stories as a result.)

Sending the same document to many fax recipients showcases several other advantages computer-based fax offers over stand-alone fax machines. For example, while top-of-the-line stand-alone fax units let me store recipients' fax numbers, the limit is usually around 30 names; fax/modems can store many more numbers. With a stand-alone machine, I cannot call up the fax numbers on-screen to modify them easily, as I can with a fax/modem. When I broadcast fax messages, the fax/modem gives me feedback about the status of each transmission (such as letting me know that a so-called fax number I had in my press-release database did not have a fax machine at the other end).

RECEIVING FAXES

If you want your fax/modem ready to receive faxes at all times, you'll have to leave your computer on. (Some fax/modems are send-only devices, such as the type sold by Apple for its new notebook computers.) But computers are low-wattage machines, generally less power-hungry than a 100-watt bulb. Once you receive the fax in your computer, you can print it out on a laser printer, simulating a plain-paper fax. (Getting a hard copy, however, is an extra step that you don't have to go through when receiving a fax on a stand-alone machine.) The received fax is a graphics file you can edit in your desktop-publishing or paint program. Finally, if you have optical character recognition (OCR) software, you can tranform the graphics file into a text file that you can edit in your word processor.

The other main disadvantage of computer-based fax is that you have to scan in existing documents, such as newspaper clippings, into the computer. As a solution, you could add a hand-held scanner with OCR capabilities, such as the Typist Graphics (Caere Corp.), to your system.