How to Fax a Scanned Document from a Computer
In 2025, it’s easier than ever to scan and fax documents from your home or office. Unlike the days when faxing required a physical fax machine, today you can fax documents directly from your computer, tablet or smartphone. This means if you have a physical document that you need to send to someone, you can scan and fax it from pretty much wherever you want!
In this article, we’ll cover the best ways to easily scan and fax documents from a computer. We’ll cover how to scan and fax with minimal effort, from the convenience of home or work.
Scan to Fax From a Computer
The method that you use to scan from your computer depends on one question: Do you have a printer/scanner?
If you have a printer or printer/scanner combo, you can scan documents directly to your computer. Many modern printers offer scan, fax, copy and print abilities, meaning many have some sort of scanner built in, such as a flatbed scanner. A dedicated document scanner can also be purchased fairly inexpensively, if you plan to regularly scan documents.
If you don’t have a scanner, you can still use your smartphone to scan documents! We’ll walk through doing both.
Using a printer/scanner
If you do have a printer with a built-in scanner, and it’s connected to your computer through Wi-Fi or a wired connection (if you use it to print, it’s connected), it should be fairly easy to scan.
Basic scanning steps using Windows PC
If you’re using a Windows device, type Scanner into your search bar and select Printers & Scanners.
Under the list of available printers & scanners, you should see your printer if it’s connected to your PC. If your printer or scanner isn’t connected, you’ll need to click Add a printer or scanner.
Once you’ve added your scanner, once again click the Windows search bar and type Windows fax and scan.
This is the interface that you’ll use to scan your document. If you have a fax machine, you can also fax documents from here!
Click New Scan to begin scanning. You will need to have a scanner connected to your PC to do this.
Basic scanning steps using a Mac
If you’re using a Mac, open System Settings, then Printers & Scanners, and locate your printer-scanner. In the example below, the printer-scanner is a Samsung M2070.
Click once to open the printer. Then select Open Scanner…
You will see Image Capture open. From here, you may configure the scanner, color, size, format and location. For scanning documents to be faxed, you should select the PDF format.
Using a Smartphone
To scan using a phone, you’ll need a scanning app to take high-quality images of your documents. In this guide on mobile app scanning, we show you how to use a mobile app to scan a document. If you have a smartphone with a camera, this is easy to do.
The difference between using a scanning app and your camera is the quality of the photo and the format that the scanning app exports your document. You will need your document in the PDF format to fax it. If you simply take a picture of your document, that might work for the quality, but you’ll still need to convert it to a PDF.
Last Step: Fax Your Scanned PDF
Once you’ve created a PDF of your document, faxing is fairly easy.
Fax.Live is an entirely digital fax service, making it the perfect bridge between digital (faxing with a computer) and analog (your recipient’s fax machine). With Fax.Live, you don’t need to download fax-specific programs or apps. Fax.Live will function entirely in your web browser. You can even use Fax.Live from your Android phone, iPhone, tablet, or laptop. Almost any device with an internet connection can use Fax.Live.
Fax.Live’s digital service is also packed with many additional features, such as a dashboard to manage faxes and dedicated fax number, so you can receive faxes from your computer as well as send them. Fax.Live also has a stored history of all of your sent and received faxes, so you can retrieve documents that were sent whenever you need them.
No hardware is required to use Fax.Live — you don’t need a phone line or a physical fax machine to send or receive documents. On the other end, the receiver won’t notice any difference! This is because Fax.Live takes advantage of remote faxing that sends faxes over phone lines. Recipients do, however, need to have either a fax machine or an online fax account to receive faxes.
With Fax.Live and a smartphone, you can scan and fax your document today using just a smartphone or computer! Try our Fax.Live’s free trial today to see how convenient it is to fax from a computer.
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