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At various times during the PC era, now going on 40 years, we all heard about that great paperless office that the new technology would produce. Funny thing, though.

It did not just come about by buying some computers. Companies that did make a goal of reducing the use of paper expended a great deal of time and energy making that happen, while the others who were expecting a miracle kept producing just as many pieces of paper, sometimes even more, as they always had.

There is a key lesson here, which is that tools do not build houses, carpenters do, and they usually have a good blueprint. One area of business operations that was founded on the use of paper, faxing, is now one of the leaders in the save-a-tree movement.

If not enough on its own to make yours a paperless office, online faxing and other digital workflows can help you reduce the amount of paper and other consumables that you use on a daily basis. Over even a brief period, the savings can mount dramatically. Combined with savings on ink, toner and replaceable fax machine elements (like expensive drums), there are real economic advantages to using online faxing. Even more, there are good management and business reasons for it, as well. Among the many pluses is the easy archiving and retrieval of online faxes. Bits and bytesIn the old days (notice, not the good old days) of faxing, even the invention of plain paper fax machines did not solve the storage and archiving challenge.

It was, of course, quite awkward to file away the curled up thermal paper that the first fax machines used. Not only did you have to waste time flattening them out, or rolling them up backwards, you had to cut long faxes out of the continuous rolls that were used for output. Even then, thermal faxes had a nasty habit of fading, sometimes quite quickly, so even more waste resulted from making photocopies of the faxes you wanted to file.

The amount of paper, energy, time and money that went into the famous black hole is nearly incalculable. As soon as online faxing became possible with the rise and spread of the Internet, the whole workflow could be revised. Even without planning for it, companies were saving money on paper because employees could read the faxes on their computers and did not necessarily have to print them out. Oddly enough, plenty of people continued to print out online faxes just for the purpose of filing and storage.

If the workflow were truly updated, this would not have to happen.

There are any number of ways to accomplish easy archiving and retrieval of online faxes. Formats and filesDepending on how you send your online faxes, you can simple file the word-processing document or other file that you are attaching to your outgoing message. All you need to do is plan for this, that is, have appropriate directories/folders set up for the various outgoing documents you want to save. For incoming faxes, the process is a bit lengthier, but is still only a matter of minutes and will require no paper whatsoever. First, remember that what you are receiving is an image file, not a word processing file, although you can run received faxes through your Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to get editable text if you need it.

If you do this, you can save the resulting text file itself. However, if the fax you receive has both text and graphics, or mostly the latter, you can also save part or all of that incoming file, which will typically be an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file, a JPEG image or a TIF/TIFF file. Working with image editorsAgain, you can just go ahead and save the incoming attachment in the file format it arrives as, or you can use commercial, shareware or freeware applications to open it up and carve out just what you need. Whatever you do, you now have the freedom to name the file whatever you want, combine it with other elements into a single document or use the elements in a project document that is being created in Microsoft Office or just about any other program. Keeping your files in order is crucial, of course, and now you can easily archive, backup, use and even print (when necessary) any of the incoming information that you get from your online faxes.

You will be amazed at how much paper you can save when you get into an all-digital workflow, and the financial and environmental rewards are both quite pronounced.

It is a good business move, a good ecological move and just plain good thinking!
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