Alternate Sources Web Subscription Help

WELCOME

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Customer Support

WholeSM Publishing
P. O. Box 19591-501
55 Bloor Street West
Toronto, Ontario M4W 3T9 .

If you’d like support by facsimile, please send them to: 416.962.1044 . We can receive them any time of day or night.

Support and help are also available by e-mail from . Please note that support is available for the first three months after purchase of your licence.

You should provide detailed information about both your computer and the problems you are having.

Telephone support is available from 416.962.1040 between 09:00 and 17:00 Eastern Standard Time. Outside these hours, please leave a message.

Instructions

If there are no records found with a match to your criteria, you will be prompted to modify the search. If you have entered no search criteria, you will be told that no records match and you will be prompted to modify the search.

If you’d like to look up everything in a particular town, type the town name in the town field and perhaps put a province / state / county name in its field (remember, there's a Newton in just about every English-speaking country...) to find all the organizations and businesses in that town.

Hint: Remember to use the full name of the province/state/ county. Alternate Sources is an international guide, so people from France may not know that the U.S. abbreviation of Maine is ME. Also, please note that the United States of America may be sought by using "USA" or United States of America" or " U S A" or any shortening of these that would uniquely specifiy the U.S. (I.e. you would have to use "US" or "Un St" because "U" alone would also return Uraguay and the United Arab Emirates).

London is in the county field, since it is so large and has many 'towns' inside it. All other town names are stored in the spelling of the local language.

Only if your search under name fails to find anything should you try an abbreviation in that field, because we have put some, few abbreviations in that field. For example: the National Leather Association, which is often referred to as the "NLA."

If you want to narrow your search to a particular type of organization in that a, just put a search criterion in the type field, as well as the city field. If you use the Type field, you searches may work better if you use only the beginning parts (i.e. up to the part where the singular and plural differ) of any words that have plurals in the Type list (shown on the Type Help page).

You can add as much critical information as you want to narrow your search.The more criteria you add to the fields in the Find window, the more you narrow down your search. For instance, asking for all Organizations BDSM will find you hundreds of organizations.

Each time you add a criterion to the search you are, in effect, saying that you want to narrow the search. So, putting Paris in the town field as well as Organizations BDSM in the Type field, will narrow your search of BDSM organizations to only the ones in Paris. It will not return all BDSM organizations and all listings in Paris at the same time.

Alternate Sources will search for all words that begin with the letters you have typed in the fields. We urge you to type at least three characters for each word (where possible) to speed up your searches and those of other people using the database engine.

If you type more than one word into a field (i.e. separated by space characters), Alternate Sources will find all entries that have both words. For example, ’rain sun’ finds ’rain or sun’ and ’sunny with rainbows’ but not ’sunny day’ (because there is no rain in the last phrase).

The order of the words you type for query does not matter.

The case of the text in your entered criteria does not matter. This means that looking for "trouble" is the same as looking for "TROUBLE" is the same as looking for "TrouBLe".

To match a whole phrase, enclose it in double quotes, for example: "ice cream" matches "ice cream cones" and "ice creams," but not the phrase "cream and ice." When your search has been performed, the number of found records appears at the top right of the Details and the Listings windows.

When the search engine returns listings from your initial search, it does so in listing format. To obtain the detailed information about the listing that interests you, simply click on its name. This will link you to the detailed information for that listee. Clicking on the Type in the listing format will initiate another search for all listees with that type.

Advanced Use

@ matches one arbitrary character; for example ’@rain’ finds ’train’ but not ’rain’ or ’strain’

* matches zero or more arbitrary characters; for example ’*bow’ matches ’bow’ and ’rainbow’

Keywords for Searches

Please note that, for the time being, a search for "Gay" will also find "Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, & Transsexual" (i.e. "LGBT"). We are working on ways to allow for searches for each orientation alone.

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