Four Ways to Ditch Your Fax Machine

I can count on one hand the number of 166 year old electrical gadgets still in use in the modern office. Chief among them, though, is the fax machine, invented in 1843, around the same time as the dirigible. Why, exactly, are we still using it? (Faxes, that is. Dirigibles are cool.)

In last week's poll on obsolete tech in your office, 69 percent of us claimed to still be using fax machines. But they're slow, inefficient, and analog. Their content--inbound and out--is not searchable. In fact, faxes have no compelling advantages at all aside from the fact that without them, your more technically challenged suppliers and clients would have no way to communicate with you. It's time to wean yourself off faxes. Try some of these tips:

• Send faxes online for free. We've already told you about Web services that let you send faxes without a machine and without paying a penny.
• Use a file-sharing service like Drop.io to send Word and PDF files to a fax machine from the comfort of the Web.
• Use the camera in your cell phone to "scan" and fax documents with Qipit, for free. Or, try scanR, which offers pretty much the same deal, but after the trial it costs $5/month.
• Just use e-mail. Need to make sure the file isn't easily edited on the other end? Convert your Word document to a PDF for free with PDF-to-Word, without installing any software.

Photo by Alyssa L. Miller