Compact Disclosure Canada

Compact Disclosure Canada provides facts and figures on approximately 8500 Canadian public, private, and crown companies. Company records may include up to 7 years of financial information (income statements, balance sheets, financial ratios), directory-type information including addresses, officers, SIC grouping, and various text fields that may contain letters to shareholders from annual reports, mergers and acquisitions information, operating statistics, capital stock changes, and lists of subsidiaries. Searches can be conducted by company name, type of business, financial criteria, rankings, stock exchange information, etc.
Coverage: Library has disks dated 08/1992-09/2000.

The Disclosure disks can be checked out at the Business Library's circulation desk. The software to run the disks is loaded on the library's Compustat PC.

To begin, insert the disk into the drive. Click on Start, then Programs, then Compact Disclosure Canada.

Searching

To search for a company or set of companies, click on SEARCH/MODIFY in the menu bar across the top of the window. A popdown menu with submenus will display showing a wide range of criteria for selecting companies.

According to the search style which you choose e.g. Company name versus Financial information, secondary search screens appear providing appropriate search methodology. The software uses three basic search types for selecting companies: numeric search, full text search and index search. For example, 'company name' and 'words in company name' searching will offer full text searching, while a 'financial information' query (with its subsequent choices) will invoke the numeric search function. Index searching is the most common search function, and is activated. Some comments about using each of these search types are provided just below.

Numeric Search:

See the illustrations near the bottom of the box for help with how to enter values. Only one numeric search option can be selected at a time.

Full Text Search:

See the illustrations near the bottom of the box for help with entering words and phrases. Note, the software is using the boolean "or" operator between terms on each line, so search results will list reports that contain either term. To limit search results to reports that contain both terms, you must do a search with one term and then MODIFY the search using a second term.

Index Search

For each index, we recommend that you click in the window to see what is being indexed. You may then scroll through the list of terms or enter a term in the ENTER box to move rapidly to a term. Highlight terms you wish to use; you may select as many as you want at one time (deselect items by clicking on the highlight).

Once you have entered a search you may expand or reduce the results by modifying the search. Click on SEARCH/MODIFY in the menu bar across the top of the window. Use the popdown menus once again to select the new criteria you wish to include. In the "Modify Search" window that opens, correct the search options as necessary and click on the MODIFY button. Enter the new criteria and execute the search.

At any time, to start a completely new search, click on SEARCH/MODIFY and select the criteria for your new search using the popdown menus. In the "Modify Search" window that opens click on the NEW SEARCH button. Now execute the new search. Marks on company records only apply to the current search results so be sure to save any marked records before doing a new search.

Displaying

Search results will be displayed one company at a time. A numeric counter in the bottom right corner of the window indicates the number of companies you have retrieved with your current search. Use the NEXT and PREV buttons to move between companies.

The system automatically displays a short company profile for each company but much more information about each company is available. To alter the display, click on DISPLAY in the menu bar across the top of the window, and select a new format from the popdown menu that is presented.

Sorting

Search results will automatically display in company name order. You may alter the order by sorting the results by information in the records or by the frequency that search terms were found in the records. To do so, click on SORT in the menu bar across the top of the window. If you select "by frequency of qualifying terms" in the popdown menu that appears, the results list will immediately be sorted with the record having the highest frequency of your search term first. If you select "by information in records", a window will appear in which you can select up to two sorting criteria and specify ascending or descending sequence. Once you have sorted your results, they can be returned to their original order by clicking on SORT again and selecting "undo sort".

Marking

While browsing through your search results you can mark the records of particular companies for saving. To mark a company's record, click in the MARKED box near the middle of the lower part of the window. Marks on company records only apply to the current search results so be sure to save any marked records before doing a new search.

Saving

Records can be saved to a 3 1/2" disc.

When company records are saved, Disclosure will save them using the last display format you have used to display records on the screen (see Displaying above).

To save company records, click on FILE in the menu bar across the top of the window and select SAVE DOCUMENTS in the popdown menu that appears. In the window that appears, first select the documents you want to save by using the choices under WHICH DOCUMENTS near the bottom of the window and then enter a name for your file in the FILE NAME field near the top left corner of the window. To save to a 3 1/2" disc, change the Drives to A:

Exiting

Click on FILE in the menu bar across the top of the window and select EXIT in the popdown menu.