Use Faxes in New Ways with Microsoft Office Document Imaging

A facsimile (fax) is a quick way to send a document and is cheaper than an express delivery service. However, the disadvantage of a fax is that you can't modify the text or data it contains — until now. The Microsoft Office Document Imaging program lets you modify and manipulate faxes almost as if they were documents.

Using the Office Document Imaging program, you can receive and view faxes as e-mail attachments in the Tagged Image File Format (.tiff). If you have a scanner connected to your computer, you can also scan paper documents and send them as .tiff files from your computer.

For example, let's say you're buying a house. While e-mail has sped up the process, many documents still must be delivered by faxing. You can use the Clipboard task pane and the Microsoft Office Document Imaging optical character recognition (OCR) feature to copy information from your faxes and use it or analyze it in other Office XP programs. You can also copy, cut, and paste faxed pages into other .tiff files to arrange or combine your faxed documents.

Using Office Document Imaging to modify faxes

In the example of buying a house, perhaps you have received a good faith estimate from the mortgage company and you want to paste that number into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. You can use the OCR feature of the Office Document Imaging program to convert the text of the fax into characters that you can paste into any Office XP program.

To copy, cut, and paste information from a fax into an Office program

In Windows, click Start, point to Programs, point to Microsoft Office Tools, and then click Microsoft Office Document Imaging.
On the File menu, click Recognize Text Using OCR. The OCR program runs.
Click and hold while dragging across the text or numbers you want to select.

Note Select only whole words or groups of numbers.
On the Edit menu, click Copy Text.
Start Excel 2002, click the down arrow in the task pane, and then click Clipboard from the drop-down list.
Click the number in the Clipboard task pane to paste the figure into the workbook.
Click AutoSum, and then click Sum.

Now you are able to analyze how the various costs will affect your purchase.

Using Office Document Imaging to add pages to faxes

You might also want to add a page to a fax you have received. For example, as the closing day for buying a house approaches, you might want to add faxes, receipts, and documents to your original .tiff file. When your closing is complete, this file will give you a complete record of all the documents created during your purchase. Your documents will be neat and in chronological order, and you'll have a backup of your paper originals.

Let's say you receive a fax with copies of your savings and checking account statements. Instead of having to keep track of both the fax with the statements and a fax of your mortgage application — which, like a photocopy, loses detail each time it is copied — you can use the Office Document Imaging program to add the statements to the original .tiff file from the mortgage company.

To add a page to the original fax .tiff file

In the Microsoft Office Document Imaging program, on the File menu, click Open.
Browse to the fax .tiff file you want to add to, select the file, and then click Open.
On the File menu, click Open, and then browse to and open the .tiff file you want to add to the original. A second Office Document Imaging window opens with this file.
In the second window, click the thumbnail image of the second fax, drag it over to the first window, and then drop it into the Thumbnail Pane to add it to the original fax.

Notes

If the Thumbnail Pane isn't present, on the View menu, click Thumbnail Pane.

You can rearrange the order of pages you add by clicking and dragging new pages to the correct order in the .tiff file.

Creating fax .tiff files of your paper documents

If you want to create .tiff files of your paper documents, or if you want to return documents that were faxed to you as .tiff files — for example, if you need to sign and then return a document that was sent to you as a fax — you need to either set up your computer and modem to receive and send faxes or set up a fax machine to operate with your normal phone line. You also need a scanner. For more information about setting up your equipment or sending and receiving a fax, see Windows Help.

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