We’ve included Fax as a “standard” client field since we first started MIDAS two decades ago. But our previous article got us thinking…. are fax machines still a thing in 2026?

We’ll admit, here at MIDAS HQ, we can’t remember the last time we received a fax. In fact, we can’t recall ever having sent one either!

What is a Fax Machine?

Now, it occurs to us that some reading this article may never have come across a fax machine! (Yes, we’re showing our age!)

So, if you’re not familiar, a fax machine – short for “facsimile machine” – is a technology used for transmitting documents over a traditional telecommunication (phone) network. It allows the near-instantaneous reproduction of text and images (all be it at low resolution) at a distant location.

The History Of The Fax Machine

Early Conceptualization (19th Century):

The concept of transmitting images over long distances actually dates back to the 19th century. In 1843, Scottish inventor Alexander Bain received a patent for his idea of a “Copying Telegraph” that could transmit images using a series of synchronized pendulums.

Pantelegraph (1865):

In 1865, Italian inventor Giovanni Caselli developed the “Pantelegraph,” which was the first practical fax machine. It used a rotating stylus to scan and transmit handwritten messages and images over telegraph lines.

Facsimile Transmission (1920s):

During the 1920s, advancements in radio technology led to the development of early versions of fax machines that utilized radio waves for transmission. These machines were primarily used for newspaper photo transmission.

Telephotography (1930s):

In the 1930s, “telephotography” systems emerged, allowing photographs to be sent over telephone networks. However, these systems were expensive and not widely adopted.

Xerox LDX (1964):

The first commercialized fax machine was the Xerox LDX (Long Distance Xerography), introduced in 1964. It used the then-common electrostatic printing technology to transmit documents over long distances.

ITU Standardization (1980s):

In the 1980s, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) developed standardized protocols for fax transmission, which facilitated interoperability between different fax machines and networks.

Thermal Transfer Fax Machines (1980s-1990s):

In the 1980s and 1990s, thermal transfer fax machines gained popularity due to their lower cost and improved printing quality.

Internet Faxing (1990s):

With the rise of the internet, fax technology evolved to include internet faxing or “fax over IP,” which enabled faxes to be sent and received through email and online fax services.

Decline and Legacy (2000s-2010s):

As digital technologies like email and document scanning became more prevalent, the use of traditional fax machines declined. However, fax technology continues to be used in some industries, especially in areas where secure document transmission is essential.

Modern Fax Services (Present Day):

Today, faxing has largely transitioned to digital platforms and online fax services. These services use internet protocols to send and receive faxes electronically, eliminating the need for physical fax machines and allowing for more efficient and secure document transmission.

Though the traditional standalone fax machine’s popularity has waned, the concept of faxing lives on in digital form, offering a reliable means of transmitting documents in various professional settings.

Do people still use fax machines?

The number of people using fax machines has declined due to the increasing adoption of digital communication methods like email, cloud-based document sharing, and secure messaging platforms. As a result, faxing has become less common in many regions, especially in developed countries.

While some specific industries and regions might still rely on fax machines for certain purposes, it’s safe to say that the number of people using traditional fax machines globally has significantly decreased. Online fax services and digital communication in general provides a more efficient and convenient way to send and receive documents these days. The traditional fax machine has become far less relevant.

Getting The Facts on Fax!

As MIDAS includes a field to enter a Fax number for each client record, we were keen to understand how – and indeed if – our customers use this field.

In August 2023, we took an anonymized random sample of 190 of our cloud hosted customer’s MIDAS systems. Between them, this sample of MIDAS systems contained a total of 213,887 individual client records. Here’s what we discovered…

90% of MIDAS systems have the “Fax” field enabled

We were quite surprised that this was figure so high! However, it should be noted that the Fax field is actually enabled by default in all fresh installations of MIDAS. Therefore, only 10% of customers have taken action and disabled this field.

Of the 90% of MIDAS systems where the “Fax” field is enabled, not a single system has been configured to mark this as a “Required” field.

Only 0.44% of clients have a fax number

We found that only 0.44% of client records within our anonymized sample of cloud-hosted MIDAS systems we host, contained an entry in the “fax” field. It’s also possible that some customers actually use the “Fax” field to record other client data – like an additional cell/mobile number. Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that less than 0.44% of clients have an actual fax number.

Facing The Facts on Fax!

So what are our key takeaways from these facts? How can we use this information moving forward?

Despite 90% of MIDAS systems having the Fax field enabled in 2023, this field was utilized by less than half a percent of clients.

It’s fair to say that the “Fax” client field wasn’t really used! For all intents and purposes, it was obsolete.

Our first takeaway from this was that the “Fax” field probably shouldn’t be enabled by default. By initially “hiding” this field, it would simplify the editing of client records.

We took this one step further in MIDAS v4.35 by actually removing “Fax” as a standard MIDAS client field all together. Instead, if customers do wish to capture client fax numbers, they could easily create a custom client field for this purpose instead.

Customers using the previous standard “Fax” client field need not worry! We ensured that the software update process to v4.35 automatically migrated fax data over to a custom client field with the same name.

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For MIDAS v4.37, we’re making improvements to a couple of the ‘custom’ fields you can add to your scheduling system.

Custom “Text Area” fields can have a height set and can be resizable

Sometimes a single-line input field may not be sufficient to capture the amount of information you desire. In such instances, MIDAS allows you to alternatively create a multi-line “Text Area” input field.

Until now, creating a custom Text Area field would display a text input field with a relatively small height. Whilst its contents would be scrollable, the field would typically only show 2-3 lines of text at a time.

Now when creating (or editing) a custom Text Area field, you’ll have more control! You’ll be able to specify the number of rows that should be displayed at any given time on the field.

So if you anticipate that your custom field is only going to hold a couple of lines of text, you can set the number of rows to display low. But, if you expect your custom field to capture dozens of lines of text, you can increase the number of rows shown.

Furthermore, you can also set a custom Text Area field to be “Resizable”. When a Text Area field is set as resizable, a user will be able to drag the bottom of the custom Text Area field down to allow the display of more lines of text at once.

Custom file uploads can be set to either view or save/download the file when clicked

The custom “File Upload” field was first introduced in MIDAS v4.07. If utilized, this allows a document or file to be uploaded and attached to a booking or client record.

When we implemented this custom field type in 2014, we configured MIDAS to ‘hint’ to an end-users user’s browser that an uploaded and attached file should be ‘downloaded’ to the user’s device when clicked.

In those days, it wasn’t common place for web browsers to be able to open a variety of file types. There was even a time when browsers would struggle to open and correctly display PDF files.

These days, web browsers can open and display a wide range of document/file types.

For v4.37, we’ve provided administrators with the option to allow MIDAS to ‘hint’ to user’s browsers whether an custom file upload should be either ‘downloaded’ to the user’s device when clicked, or ‘opened/displayed’ in a new window/tab instead.

So if you’re attaching PDF files to bookings, for instance, you can now instruct browsers to display these files in your browser instead of prompting you to download them to your device.

Please note that MIDAS only provides ‘hints’ to user’s browsers as to whether to view or download an attached file. It’s down to individual browsers as to whether they respect these hints and how they process the attached files.

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Now some of these fields will always be required. For bookings, a minimum of a date and a venue (room/bookable space) is required. All other booking fields can be set to be optional. Likewise, for clients, a minimum of the client’s name is required. All other client fields can be set to be optional.

Here’s a list of the standard fields which are included in MIDAS by default:

MIDAS also allows you to “turn off” fields that you don’t need. So if you don’t need to capture a client’s mailing address, you can disable that field.

But that’s not all – in addition to the standard “default” fields, you can create additional custom booking or client fields in MIDAS.

Adding Custom Fields

A range of different types of custom fields can be created, including:

• Checkbox – A “tick box” field.
• File – Allows uploading/attaching of files and documents to bookings or client records (self-hosted systems only)
• List (Single Select) – A drop-down list of pre-defined items from which a single item may be selected.
• List (Multi Select) – A drop-down list of pre-defined items from which multiple items may be selected.
• Number – A field that will only accept numerical input.
• Range – A “slider” control allowing selection of a numeric value within a defined range.
• Text – A single-line text field.
• Text Area – A multi-line text field.
• URL – A navigable web link to an external resource.

As with standard fields, custom fields can also be set to be “required”. This means that an input is required in the custom field each time it’s shown.

New Validation Feature

For MIDAS v4.34, we’re extending the capabilities of marking custom number, text, text area, and URL fields “required”.

Let’s take the example of a custom single-line text field. Marking this as a required field would ensure that a user would enter something into the field. However, MIDAS wouldn’t check what they’d actually entered. Just entering a single character, or gibberish would be enough to allow you to proceed.

From v4.34 onwards, when setting a custom number, text, text area, and URL field as “required”, you can instruct MIDAS what values are considered “valid” for the field. A user would then need to enter a “valid” value in order to proceed.

A Simple Example

As an example, you could make it so that a user has to enter the word “YES” into a custom text field in order to proceed. If the custom field doesn’t contain the word “YES”, the user will be prompted to correct their entry:

The Power Of REGEX

Regular Expressions (REGEX) can be used to create more complex validations for your custom fields too. We’ll cover REGEX in more depth in a future article. In the meantime, as a brief introduction, here are a few simple yet useful REGEX’s for validating entries into your custom fields:

You’ll find further examples together with detailed explanations in our KB article: How to use Regular Expressions for custom input validation.

How To Use

Custom field validation can be setup via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Fields.

On any custom number, text, text area, or URL fields, right-click (or long press on touch screens) on the field’s “Required” box.

You’ll then be able to set or modify the Regular Expression that should be used to validate entries to the field.

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Custom Fields Can Now Include A Descriptive Explainer

When creating a custom field in MIDAS, it may not always be clear precisely to end-users what the field is for. Or, there may be additional information you’d like to present along with the field itself.

That’s why for v4.25 you may also set a description for each custom field. These descriptions are shown to users just above the field, so they’ll know exactly what the field is for.

What’s more, these descriptions may also include simply HTML, allowing for instance the inclusion of a link.

Here’s an example of a custom field without a description:

Here’s the same field, but this time with a description, including a clickable link:

Enforce a Maximum Input Length in Custom Text Fields

When creating a custom text field, you can now limit the maximum number of characters users may enter into the field:

Control How Many Options Are Displayed At Once In Custom List Fields

When creating a custom single select or multi select drop-down list field, you may now indicate how many items from the list should be displayed at any one time. Typically, browsers default to showing 1 item at a time in a single-select list, and 4 items at a time in a multi-select. You can now override this default behavior for each list field:

These are just a few of the new and improved features for MIDAS v4.25. Please see this post for details of other new features you’ll find in v4.25.

You can also ask questions and discuss the new features of v4.25 over on Reddit.

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Our first update in 2020 includes a host of new and improved features, which we’re going to give you a look at in the coming blog posts.

In this post we’re going to cover the first of these new features coming in MIDAS v4.24:

Multi-Select Custom List Fields

One of the reasons our room bookings software is so flexible and versatile is that we allow you to create your own bespoke booking fields, and more recently your own bespoke client fields too!

The types of custom booking/client fields you can create in MIDAS are as follows:

• Checkbox – A “tick box” field
• File – (self-hosted editions only) Allows uploading/attaching of files and documents to client records
• List – A drop-down list of pre-defined items
• Number – A field that will only accept numerical input
• Range – A “slider” control allowing selection of a numeric value within a defined range
• Text – A single-line text field
• Text Area – A multi-line text field
• URL – A navigable web link to an external resource

Documentation on how to create and use custom fields in your MIDAS system may be found here. We also have a short tutorial covering custom fields too:

Until now the custom “List” field allowed users to select a single item from a list of pre-defined values created by an administrator, and assign the selected item to the booking or client record.

For v4.24, we’re expanding the custom “List” field options to additionally include a “multi select” list option. Administrators can now also create drop-down lists from which users may select multiple options.

Administrators will of course also be able to select which option (or options) in the list are selected by default, and also control whether the list is visible to all users, or restricted to just certain users:

We’re excited about the new custom “multi-select list” field option coming in v4.24. Once again, this has been implemented as a direct result of customer feedback. Remember, we love feedback and feature requests from our customers, so do vote and let us know what you’d like to see in future updates to our software.

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We’re excited to announce that the forthcoming v4.22 update will include the often requested feature of “custom client fields”, including the ability for self-hosted MIDAS customers to attach documents (i.e. insurance certificates, contracts, etc) to client records.

Similar to the “custom booking fields” feature first introduced way back in 2010, which allows administrators to add additional booking fields to their MIDAS system on top of the standard booking fields, the new custom client fields feature will provide similar functionality to client records in your MIDAS database.

Prior to v4.22, the standard client fields in MIDAS were fixed and allowed you to capture the following items of data for each of your clients/customers:

• Client name
• Organization
• E-mail address (or addresses)
• Postal address
• Telephone number
• Fax number (since deprecated as a ‘standard’ field in MIDAS v4.35)
• Mobile/Cell number
• Notes

The introduction of custom client fields gives you even more flexibility! Now you’ll be able to add additional fields to capture other client information that you wish to collect, for example you could add a “Salutation” list field (Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, Rev, Dr, etc), or a file upload field to capture an insurance document from your clients..

The types of custom client fields that may be added are the same as those available for custom booking fields, namely:

• Checkbox – A “tick box” field
• File – (self-hosted editions only) Allows uploading/attaching of files and documents to client records
• List – A drop-down list of pre-defined items
• Number – A field that will only accept numerical input
• Range – A “slider” control allowing selection of a numeric value within a defined range
• Text – A single-line text field
• Text Area – A multi-line text field
• URL – A navigable web link to an external resource

Both custom booking and custom client fields may be managed via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Fields

From this screen you’ll also be able to control which client fields (both standard and custom) should be included on printouts, in search results, and on public booking/request screens. You’ll also be able to re-order client fields as well as selectively hide them from individual users too!

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