Finding phone numbers is no longer the challenge it used to be. A number of free services exist on the Web to help you. So the question is, why pay for a CD‐ROM. Pro CD’s Select Phone provides the answer: ease of use, completeness, and a delightful user interface ‐ all running at hard drive speeds.
The six CDS that come with Select Phone contain more than 95 million residential and commercial listings. The discs are arranged by region, of course. The manual is informative and easy to use. It seems to me to be neither too long nor two short. It is well laid out in seven chapters.
After the Introduction and Getting Started chapters, a twelve page Select Phone at a Glance chapter describes what the product can do and gives suggestions for using it effectively. It clearly describes ways to import, create, use, and export data. The next three chapters treat details of using the product in Windows, Macintosh, and DOS environments. The final chapter is titled Tips and Techniques.
The obvious first use of this product is to find someone’s phone number in a distant city. Doing so is straightforward, using a quite standard, serviceable fill‐in‐the‐labeled‐blanks input screen. You don’t have to fill in all the blanks. In the examples I tried, name and city were enough, with small cities; with larger ones, I used known or recognized or guessed addresses to try to get the right phone number. Just as I would with a print phone book or with long distance information.
But anyone who has tried to find an out of state name through the local information service knows that it takes time and costs money. Many businesses would recoup the one time cost of this product quickly in savings on long distance information. No waiting for web connections.
And sometimes what you really want is a snail mail address which includes a ZIP code. Phone companies are not in the business of providing such information. This CD give you that.
This product supports other kinds of searches. A colleague searched for “tuna” and was pleased to find several organizations relevant for commercial tuna fishing that he did not know existed. Select Phone also allows much more sophisticated kinds of searching. The same colleague used it to locate manufacturers of sensors on the West Coast by keying the closest SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) code he could find plus the term “sensor.” I only recently learned of SIC codes; the description of them in the Select Phone manual is quite good.
Select Phone has a wide range of uses for business, politics, or conducting survey research. For example, it will produce lists by adjacent addresses. This product, with its companion Select Street, could produce precinct “walking lists” for use in political campaigns. The only significant problem I encountered with Select Phone was that I couldn’t find an installation file on one of the discs even though the manual indicated it was on all discs. Overall, I highly recommend this CD set for people, companies, and libraries looking for a single, nation‐wide directory of phone and street addresses. At my firm, we figure that it would pay for itself in about a month of use by cutting labor time and saving telephone calls to directory assistance. Equally important, the interface is so straightforward that almost anyone can use it without opening a manual or help file. The only drawback is you cannot search the whole country at once. You will want to install a multiple CD‐ROM reader. Otherwise, you end up switching CDs to get to the appropriate region.
