Basic Steps
Viewing, Printing & Saving
Scope

1. Click Search/Modify from the menu bar and select the type of search you want. Categories include company name, type of business, geographic area, financial information, full text fields and more.
2. In the Enter box type your company or topic. In most cases an alphabetical list will appear. Click on desired term in bottom box.
3. Repeat step 2 until all desired companies/terms are selected. The total selected will be in the upper left box. Click OK when complete.
4. Your first record will appear in a short Company Profile format.
   Choose one of the text view icons to change display format. For a full range of format options, choose Display from the menu bar. The User Defined Format and User Defined Report (spreadsheet style) allow you to customize your own display.
5. Results can be expanded or narrowed by choosing Search/Modify again.
6. Choose Sort to arrange listing by various criteria such as geography or financial data. For example, in Compact D/SEC you can compile a list of all software companies, limit them to headquarters in Massachusetts and sort them by total assets, sales, etc.

Reports can be printed or downloaded to DOS-formatted 3.5" high density disks. Downloading in the display format produces an ASCII text file which can be easily brought into word processing software.

1. From the menu bar choose File . . . Save Documents . . .
2. Choose Save In drive/folder
3. Enter your file name with a
   .doc extension for use in Microsoft word,
   .csv for comma delimited files for Excel.
4. Indicate format for downloading the file:
   Standard (ASCII) - text files for Word or NotePad
   Tagged - for some database applications
   Comma (CSV) - for files with commas between the columns for Excel
   Tab Delimited - for tabs between the columns
   Fixed - for columns with fixed field lengths
   
   To bring reports into spreadsheet and database applications, files should be downloaded in a format of either comma-delimited or fixed-length fields.
5. Indicate which documents and click Save.

Worldscope has 6 years of financial statements and ratios for over 20000 companies in 50 markets are presented in a standardized format. It also provides average ratios for industries by country and a summary of accounting practices for each country.

Be aware that the data in Worldscope is manipulated to fit in Disclosure's pre-defined fields. For in-depth analysis financial data should be compared with original annual or 20-F reports available Thomson Research or original filings from the company (try their web site).  

Thomson Research but without the
search/download options of this CD-ROM version.
See also Mergent Online for global companies.

Updated October 25, 2006
By  Cynthia Robinson