Can we add faxing to our stylish printer?
Q I co-own a small business, based in an office we set up in my colleague’s converted garage. When our old printer broke, my colleague replaced it with a Canon Pixma 6250 multifunction printer. But while it fits in with our office decor, he forgot that we sometimes need to send and receive faxes. We mostly work online using Microsoft Office 365. Is there any way we can add fax functionality without having to ditch the Pixma for something big and ugly? Wendy Simpson
A The short answer is yes, but it might get complicated. If you don’t want to keep your current fax number, you could choose an online fax service. These generally work by letting you email a document you wish to fax to an email address containing the number you want to send it to. You can set up a dedicated fax number for incoming faxes: anything received there will be emailed to you as an attachment. This would work using Outlook to email Office 365 documents. This could also work if you’ve got a dedicated fax number that you want to keep. Services such as efax ( www.efax.co.uk) will let you import an existing number, saving you the headache of updating your customers.
However, if you use a range of online services you may find that many email-to-fax solutions lack flexibility. For instance, if you also use Google Drive you might find it better to use Interfax ( www.interfax.net), which can send documents from a wide range of services and receive them directly into Google Drive. However, this service won’t let you import an existing number.
If none of these appeals, you may need to buy a new printer. Not every printer with fax is ugly. Canon’s own Maxify range manages to remain reasonably smart (we particularly like the MB5350, pictured), while Epson, Brother and HP all offer stylish models.