WinFax Pro 10 for Win 95/98/NT/2000 is a software for sending and receive faxes from your PC. You can either send a fax to a fax machine or e-mail it across as a self-viewing e-mail attachment. The person receiving this e-mail doesn’t need to install any special software. The attachment is in fax format, so one can only view and can’t make any modifications to it.

We installed WinFax Pro on a Win 98 machine. Installation is simple and a wizard guides you through the process. Overall, the software is pretty easy to use. Its interface is similar to e-mail clients like Outlook and Outlook Express. Like these e-mail clients, it also has a Received log to store all your incoming faxes, an Outbox for storing pending faxes, a Send log to keep track of the faxes sent by you, and a Wastebasket. You can later create reports for the same and track information like the date and time you sent or received a fax, number of pages, etc.

WinFax Pro has a useful "Cover page" option. This is like a covering letter to your fax and includes information like your name, fax number, recipient’s name and fax number, date, etc, or some additional note that you may want to add. This is useful as it gives a gist of your fax to the person you’re sending it to. You can either select a cover page from a set of pre-designed pages or create customized cover pages. The pre-designed cover pages are grouped in various categories, like General, Business, Cartoon, etc, with an interesting collection of themes and graphics.

Another useful feature of the software is its ability to combine, arrange, and fax multiple documents into a single fax. So you can easily attach a Word document, an Excel sheet, etc, into a single fax, arrange it in the order you want, and fax it across. A Print to WinFax icon automatically gets added to your application, and you just need to click on this button to attach your document in WinFax Pro. It also supports Group faxing, that is, you can send the same fax to a group of people. You can also schedule your faxes to be sent at a particular time. This is useful as you can save on cost by sending faxes at off-peak hours.

WinFax Pro integrates with e-mail clients and PIMs (Personal Information Managers). We used it with Outlook Express and could easily access our address book in WinFax Pro.

It also supports Internet faxing, that is, sending faxes through the Internet. However, this is not a free service and you’ll need to pay to make use of it.

Neelima Vaid at PCQ Labs