Call it what you will (and a little Boolean logic will let you call it four things at the same time), environmental responsibility appears on many a radar screen. Corporations care, environmental groups care, foodies care, Moms care, government regulators care, and maybe even you care.

This issue of Information Update looks at just a few sources that can help you save money, buy healthful products, and check up on corporate sustainability. Have fun, and let the rest of the Information Update readers know if you find a bargain or have more sites to share.

Save Money

Download coupons for organic foods.

Cascadian Farm Coupons - Free registration delivers coupons to your email box whenever they become available.

HealthESavers - Includes natural brands of food, beverages, and nutritional supplements.

Organic Valley - The Organic Valley brand represents over 1,800 farmer-owned farms.  Sign up for their newsletter with special offers and coupons.

Stonyfield Farm - Create a free account and receive instant access to coupons and other offers.

Whole Foods Market - Choose printable coupons from the current store guide.

Sustainable Live*Work*Play - Links to other sites including EarthBound Farms, Simply Organic, Newman’s Own, and Lundberg Family Farms.

Healthful Products

Shop for clothing and other products.

Maggie’s Organics - For fair trade, organic fibers clothing.

Rawganique - Sweatshop free products made from European hemp.

Environmental Working Group Health Cleaning Guide - Guide that ranks over 2,000 household cleaning products.

Corporate Sustainability

A 2011 survey by Ernst & Young shows that both customers and employees are driving corporate sustainability efforts.  At the same time, executives report an awareness that sustainability matters and awareness is on the rise of the scarcity of business resuorces.

To find out what a company is doing with corporate sustainability, check out their Investor Relations page.  There you will almost always find a Corporate Sustainability Report (CSR).  To search across multiple companies simultaneously, try the Global Reporting Initiative‘s Sustainability Disclosure Database.

For a European take on sustainability, try Corporate Social Responsibility Europe from the European Monitoring Centre on Change.

For a comprehensive full-text database covering all aspects of sustainability, you might want to check out EBSCO’s Sustainability Reference Center.  As this article goes to “press” they appear to be offering a free trial.

In the forward to this edition, Gary Price makes a good point.  Web databases from Google, Bing, and others continue to grow larger, so finding what you want becomes ever more challenging.  ”In other words, the haystack is growing and finding the needles takes more time and requires greater skill.”

Every chapter of Extreme Searcher’s Internet Handbook, 4th Edition includes important skills and interesting tid bits.  For instance:

Chapter 1 – Basics for the Serious Searcher – Add search terms to narrow your search (get fewer results), and remove search terms to broaden your search.  Did you know that the Internet began as a network of four (4!!) host computers?  At this point we’re getting pretty close to a billion hosts.

Chapter 2 – Directories and Portals – The Open Directory Project is the largest general web directory with about 5 million sites.

Chapter 3 – Search Engines: The Basics – Search on page titles to limit or focus your results.  Enter intitle:your term in the search box.  Try intitle:urban gardening to see how this works.

Chapter 4 – Search Engines: The Specifics – You can enter up to 32 words in the Google search box.  I’m not sure why you would want to, but you could.

Chapter 5 – Discussion Groups, Forums, Newsgroups, and Their Relatives – Omgili searches more than 100,000 forums, newsgroups, and mailing lists.  Hock tells us it has more “searchability” than its competitors.  I agree.

Chapter 6 – The Internet Reference Shelf – The Internet includes an abundance of reference works like dictionaries, almanacs, and encyclopedias.  Here’s a good one.  Infobel has phone directores for more than 200 countries and contains links to white pages, yellow pages, business directories, and email directories.

Chapter 7 – Sights and Sounds: Finding Images, Audio, and Video –  Here’s a great tip from page 190. “When searching for images, start by limiting your query to one or two words.  Most images only have very few words of indexing associated with them.”  I didn’t know that!

Chapter 8 – News Resources – Hock makes a good point about news sources.  Where you look will depend upon what kind of news you are looking for, current stories or older stories.  This chapter provides all the scoop on where to turn.  I’ll throw in a plug for Patch to find hyperlocal news.

Chapter 9 – Finding Products Online – The author categorizes Amazon, Yahoo! Shopping, and eBay as online shopping malls.  Never thought of that, but it makes sense to me.

Chapter 10 – Your Own Place on the Web: Participating and Publishing – This chapter reminds us that the web is not just for research and finding things.  It also provides a platform to contribute.  Remember MySpace?  It’s still out there, and in taking a look I learned there’s a New MySpace.  Who knew?

Extreme Searcher’s Internet Handbook, 4th Edition, is a must have. Searchers, whether novice or experienced, will benefit from the many tips, tricks, insights, and websites described in this book.

For those hearty readers who have persevered to the end, here’s a really great tip.  Author Ran Hock has created a website with links to all of the resources mentioned in the book.  Check it out.

Pivot tables offer an elegant solution.  Excel pivot tables help you organize and sort data to create customizable tables.  A pivot table can group and summarize huge amounts of information, making it “explorable.”

In a recent project the client provided a spreadsheet containing over 160,000 cells of data with each row recording a purchasing transaction from somewhere within this global corporation.  Instincts told me that this spreadsheet offered a gold mine of insights for the project at hand, if only I could dig them out.

Where to begin?

One call to a most accomplished Excel guru revealed the wonders of the pivot table.  Ten minutes on the phone, with the aid of a screen-sharing, and I was off and running.  In short order I could see what kind of supplies were being purchased as well as which departments and individuals were doing the most buying.  The analysis revealed a fair amount of duplications and opportunity for cost savings.  I don’t see how I could have uncovered these patterns and practices without using pivot tables.

For a seven minute demo on creating and using pivot tables, check out this video from Michael McDonald, author of Excel 2007: The Missing Manual.

For a quick look at a wide variety of pivot tables search ‘pivot table’ in Bing’s image search.

Do it Yourself: Search TV News

TV News on the Internet Archive indexes 389,000 broadcasts and makes them searchable.  For this article I searched “BP executives” and retrieved stories from CNN, CBS Morning News, MSNBC, BBC World News, Fox News, and many more. TV News delivers the information in 30-second snippets.  To get more of the story you can search for the next snippet or you can borrow the broadcast on DVD.

Formatting a document can take time and patience when you use the drop down menus.  Keyboard shortcuts deliver the same results faster and easier to create great looking documents.

No doubt you are familiar with Ctrl C to copy and Ctrl P to paste selected text.  Here are five more shortcuts that I use regularly. What shortcuts do you use?

Superscript

Ctrl Shift +  Press these three keys simultaneously to insert a letter or number above the line.  Use the same short cut to return to standard type.

Skip to the Next Page (page break)

Ctrl Enter  It’s that simple.  Simultaneously press the Ctrl and Enter keys to insert a page break and move the cursor to the top of the next page.

Apply heading

Ctrl Alt 1   If you’re using headings or subheadings in the text of the document, select the appropriate text and press Ctrl Alt 1 to apply Heading 1.  Use Ctrl Alt 2 for Heading 2.  I’ve had this work through Heading 3, but not for Heading 4.

Insert Hyperlink

Ctrl K   Select and copy (Ctrl C) the URL or web address that you want to insert as a hyperlink.  Select the word or phrase that you want to make into a hyperlink.  Press Ctrl K and a window will pop up.  The cursor is already positioned in the address box, so all you have to do is paste (Ctrl P) the URL into the address box and press Enter.  All done!

Select everything from this point to the end of the document

Ctrl Shift End  Position the cursor at the start, press Ctrl Shift End, and you will select everything from that point to the end of the document.

Creating Documents that Influence Decisions

Factiva.com offers a world class product at affordable prices.  News and business content comes from more than 35,000 sources in over 200 countries with The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Sydney Morning Herald, and Le Monde among them.  Factiva includes thousands of sources not available on the free Web providing a global view along with the local perspective.   Factiva fills the bill for the wide, landscape view of what’s going on in an industry or company along with the more granular look as reported by local and regional sources.

As I write this Factiva offers a pay-as-you-go option ideal for the one or two person company.

Lots More Options at the Library

For more databases, visit your local library.  Most city and county library systems subscribe to valuable business information sources such as EBSCO’s Business Source Corporate, Hoover’s Company Records from ProQuest, or Standard & Poor’s NetAdvantage for financial information.  Depending upon the library, these sources can often be searched from the home or office.

Tools to Format an Electronic Newsletter

Response to the new Information Update has been gratifying, and your feedback is much appreciated.  One reader asked, how did you do it?  Here at Shamel Information Services we have found that specialized software delivers the look and functionality we need.  We’ll point out two options here – one free and one fee.

MailChimp has really taken off as a free option for creating great looking newsletters and emails.  Deb Hunt over at Information Edge uses MailChimp for InSight Enewsletter.   MailChimp offers good tutorials and customer support for the do-it-yourselfer.

We use Campaign Monitor.  This tool comes at a small price that includes access to enhanced technical support and awesome analytical tools.  This is our second issue of Information Update using Campaign Monitor.  We really like it.

Let Us Hear From You

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions about information databases, electronic newsletter tools, or your specific information requirements.

Shamel Information Services or 858-673-4673

Feel free to forward this newsletter to a friend or colleage.

Copyright Basis Video

Help is on the Way for Copyright Compliance

For people who do not have the time or the inclination to study copyright compliance, we offer an alternative.

Shamel Information Services has consulted for numerous organizations to evaluate their existing practices, identify gaps, and offer solutions.

The process can include an information audit to examine current practices, consultation on organizational goals for information sharing, and recommendation of customized solutions.

We offer assistance in developing a copyright compliance policy, providing training and education, and implementing easy, customized procedures for obtaining and sharing copyrighted materials.

For more information, feel free to email Shamel Information Services <info at shamelinfo dot com> or call 858-673-4673.

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