Here’s my situation, and if anyone here could help me, I’d be immensely grateful:
I’m the word processing manager for a law firm of middling size in New York. We recently got handed a bit of a project, and it’s turning out to be a major pain in the ass.
We have to sent a daily notice (concerning some legal stuff not relevant to my question) to around 50 people, by fax, every day. Each of those 50 faxes is unique, and may go to three or four or more fax numbers. Each fax is sent daily, and is the same every day.
So we’ve compose the documents in MS Word 2003. We print them out, and our fax room guys fax them the old-fashioned way.
What I’d like to do is have them faxed by computer, using whatever tools are available in Microsoft Office and Windows XP. Ideally, once we’d created the document, it could be faxed automatically, every morning. All the documents would be faxed in a batch, one after another, each going to the correct fax numbers.
I can’t figure out how to do this. I know how to send one document, using Fax Administrator, but not how to do a batch of them.
Press the Start button. Click on “Printers and Faxes”. There is now an option either on the left side of the screen, or in the “File” menu, called “Set up Faxing”. Do what it says (this will probably require you to find the CD that Windows came on), and then “Fax” will be one of your printer options.
Henceforth, when you are in Word, don’t press the printer icon. Instead, go to File/Print, and change the pritner from whichever is the default, to “Fax”. It will ask a bunch of questions about the phone number and cover page and stiff. Basically, it treats the phone system like a printer. Don’t forget to have a phone line plugged into the computer.
You need to have a fax modem in your computer, or one plugged in externally. They’re no where nearly as popular as they once were, but you can still buy them in office supply, computer and electronics stores fairly easily. Then, when you set up Fax Services as Keeve describes, you’ll be able to fax from any application that can print.
In an office environment, there’s the added complication that fax modems require an analog line, and most offices have local electronic systems. Almost all such PBX systems have an analog line feature, but you’ll have to find out where the drop for the analog port is, or provision a new POTS line. This is something that your networking/infrastructure people will have to help with.
Note also that Fax Services allows you to receive faxes as well, but I doubt you want that for your setup, so don’t worry about configuring it during the setup process.
Thanks. I’ve got all the necessary hardware, and I know how to send one fax. What I can’t figure out how to do is send, say, 50 faxes. I’d like to enter in the information for all 50 faxes one time, and then have the same faxes sent every day without having to re-enter the information, or fax each document separately.
Sort of just push the button, and 50 faxes go out.
Sending multiple documents to multiple recipients is not something that’s easy to do in Word. It would only take a few lines of code to do it in a program, but I don’t think that’s going to help you.
You could also purchase a command-line fax product (some of which can be found by Googling, such as these) and write a simple .CMD file to do it. You could also schedule the file to be executed at a regular time if you are confident that the files will always be updated in time for it to go automatically.
You can use the merge function to send the documents to a list of fax numbers. You’ll have to create a data file with the names and numbers of the recipients.
I’ve never done this, so I can’t give step by step instructions, but check help for “merge” and “fax.”
How different are the documents that are sent to the different recipients? I was imagining that it was the same basic document with some customization for each recipient that could also be handled with the merge function. For instance, you can include paragraphs of text as merged fields, if necessary. Is that possible?
If not, there may be other ways to make merge work. In reading through the help section of my copy of Word 2000 (and 2003 may have more advanced functions), I think you should be able to create a merge document as your cover sheet that serves as a **Master Document ** [q.v.] and includes the documents you want to send as Subdocuments. Your merge data file would specify the name of the subdocument for each recipient, along with his/her contact info.
I haven’t done any of this myself, but with some twiddling (and careful testing) it seems like it might work.
If not, there’s Windows Task Scheduler and batch files. It might be a bit of a kludge to make it work efficiently, and it could get tricky if you have to change the recipient list or the documents. It involves something like programming, but it probably could be done.
This is almost certainly beyond the capabilities of Windows batch scripting, but it should be possible in vbscript. Here is a VB example which could, with a little work, be converted and adapted to your needs.