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The Microsoft Outlook E-Mail and Fax Guide
Last Updated 7/27/2009 2:10:28 PM
Chapter 2: Making Dial-Up Connections
This chapter is for people who dial in to remote mail servers or send faxes from their computers. You'll learn how to tell Windows where you're dialing from, set up Windows to dial with your credit card, adjust the international dialing code, and make dial-up connections to the Internet or to a network mail server.
This chapter is for people who dial in to remote mail servers or send faxes from their computers. (You can skip ahead if you rely solely on your office network to send and receive e-mail and faxes.) You’ll learn how to
- tell Windows where you’re dialing from
- set up Windows to dial with your credit card
- adjust the international dialing code if it changes in your country
- make dial-up connections to the Internet or to a network mail server
Of course, to make any type of dial-up connection, you need a modem. The Windows Help file has good information about setting up a modem. Choose Start, Help and on the Index tab, look for “modems.”
CONFIGURING DIALING LOCATIONS
Do you travel from city to city and reset the settings for a half-dozen communications programs at every stop? Each hotel seems to use a different code to give you an outside line. Numbers dialed as local from your office need to be dialed as long-distance calls, probably with a credit card. Make that two credit cards, because you may have one for business calls and another for checking in at home.
Windows simplifies the process with the concept of dialing locations, which are kept completely separate from phone numbers. For each location you operate from, you record a particular collection of dial settings. The settings automatically apply to every number you dial with any Windows communications program that supports the Telephony Application Programming Interface (TAPI). When you travel from your office to another city, you just change the dialing location (or create a new one) to reflect the required local settings.
Figure 2.1 shows how this works. A French businessman regularly sends faxes to a client outside Paris. He enters the number in Outlook as +33 (2) 12 34 56 78. When he’s working from Brussels, that’s exactly the number that Outlook dials. But when the businessman calls from his Paris home office, Outlook dials the number as (02) 12 34 56 78 — the correct sequence for dialing another number within France — because of the dialing location properties.
In the next few sections, you learn how to set up a dialing location, how to switch between different locations, and how to set up calling cards, which are part of dialing locations.
Basic Settings
To work with dialing locations, you need to display the Dialing Properties dialog box, shown in Figure 2.2. Choose Tools, Options, and switch to the General tab and click Dialing Options, then click Dialing Properties in the Dialing Options dialog box. You can also get to the Dialing Properties dialog box from the Control Panel. In Windows NT, run the Telephony applet. In Windows 95, you can use the Telephony applet if you have one, or choose Modems, then click the Dialing Properties button.
Each dialing location is a collection of dialing settings specific to a particular place, such as your office, your home, a hotel room in Poughkeepsie, or a client’s office in Bonn. By switching dialing locations, you can change all the dialing settings at once, rather than having to change each one individually.
Let’s first check the setup of your default dialing location. If you work at a desktop computer that never travels, this is all you need. First, in the Dialing Properties dialog box (Figure 2.2), enter your area code in the “The area code is” box and select a country from the “I am in” list, if these are not already filled in. You can also change the name of the location, if you like, in the “I am dialing from” box at the top of the screen.
Next, consider the changes you may need to make under the “How I dial from this location” section.
- If you need to dial a number to obtain an outside line for both local and long distance calls, enter that number in the “for local” box and again in the “for long distance” box.
- If you dial two different numbers for local and long distance access, enter the appropriate numbers in the “for local” and “for long distance” boxes.
- If your line has call waiting, check the box labeled “This location has call waiting.” Then either pick a code (such as *70) from the “To disable it, dial” list or type in a different code.
- If your phone system uses pulse dialing rather than the default tone dialing, click “Pulse dialing.”
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Special Note: Do not enter 1 in the “for long distance” box, even if all your long distance calls must start with a 1, as they generally do in the U.S. and Canada. Windows 95 has a table of codes for each country that indicate which number(s) to dial for long distance and even for international long distance. We look at these in more detail later in this chapter, when we discuss calling cards. |
You’ve probably noticed that we skipped the “Dial using Calling Card” settings. Calling cards cover virtually any type of dialing situation that doesn’t fit the normal format (country code + area code + number). This includes telephone credit cards or accounting codes after a number. We explore calling cards later in the chapter.
When you’ve finished setting up the default dialing location, click OK to close the Dialing Properties dialog box.
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