Get Sorted With On-Line Information

Get Sorted With On-Line Information

Travel updates, tax advice, dictionaries, listings -
it's all there for your convenience on the Net.
Sort your life out with our trusty guide...

Sometimes you just want to surf the Internet for fun - to play games, catch up on celebrity gossip or research a project dear to your heart. At other times, the World Wide Web has a more mundane purpose - it can help you streamline your social life, organise your outings and get rapid access to a host of essential contacts and useful information that will make your day to day life a great deal easier to manage. It may not sound hugely exciting but it's certainly convenient.

The Net can serve you in the combined role of filing cabinet, reference shelf and the pinboard by your telephone - and save you a lot of time and wasted paper in the process (but hey - isn't that the whole idea?).

Once you've found your useful sites, make good use of Bookmarks and organise your Favorites into labelled folders. Then you can get fast and easy access to a mass of information that is legible, extensive and far more likely to be up to date than a dog-eared timetable or an ancient clipping from a newspaper. What's more, the information is always containable and easy to sort and re-organise.

If you have sites that you visit every day, go one stage further and make them your 'Desktop Favorites', so that you can see them as soon as you open your browser. There are different ways to set this up depending on which browser you use and whether you are on a Mac or PC, but there will probably be a special folder already waiting for you within Favorites into which you can pop your top sites. If you can't work out how to do it, a kindly soul on Global Internet's Technical Support desk (e-mail support@global.net.uk or call 0870 909 8181) should be able to guide you through.

Hanging on the telephone

First off, phone numbers. Now that BT's 192 telephone service has increased to a hefty 40 pence per call, you'd be crazy not to go on-line and get the number you need for free (or almost - we pay for the telephone connection time while we're on the Internet....). http://www.192enquiries.com/ has a simple search facility and lists 1.8 million UK businesses and organisations. You also get the address in full and a handy map.

http://www.bt.com/phonenetuk/ is BT's on-line phone directory for home and business numbers. Key in what you know of the person's name and address and you will hopefully hit the jackpot.

Look and learn

If you're lost for words or need to settle a query, there are lots of on-line reference works available, great for late-night swotting. A good dictionary is Cambridge Dictionaries Online at http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/elt/dictionary/, or try the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus at http://www.m-v.com/. If you want to avoid repeating yourself, or fancy livening up your vocabulary, another simple-to-use thesaurus can be found at http://www.thesaurus.com/. You can search for similar words alphabetically or under associated categories.

For facts and statistics, Encyclopedia.com (http://www.encyclopedia.com/) is an excellent first point of call, and Information Please (http://www.infoplease.com/) is good for geography, history and biographies, although it is very US-centric.

Home improvements

If you want to try your hand at a spot of DIY, or have just tipped a bottle of Beaujolais over the cream shagpile and need to shift it fast, then check out some of the sites dedicated to domestic hints and tips. Ask The Builder is an acclaimed US site (with a tie-in TV programme) which is packed full of excellent advice for all your home improvement schemes. It's simple to navigate, exhaustive in detail and eager to please. Go to http://www.askthebuilder.com/.

In a similar vein is Doityourself.com (http://www.doityourself.com/), 'The Original Community For Doityourselfers!', with household hints and home repair advice. And you don't have to be a bored house-person to benefit from the positively indispensable site, Learn2 (http://www.learn2.com/). On our last visit the 'timely topics' were: How to talk to the boss; How to drive in the snow; How to clean an iron, make pizza dough, grow a vegetable patch and appreciate beer! What more do you need to know?

And, if you want to get green-fingered out the back of your beautifully constructed, newly-pristine home, pop along to http://www.gardenersworld.beeb.com/ for ever-changing gardening hints and tips, or the attractive British Gardening Online site (http://www.oxalis.co.uk/) for on-line plant-buying and advice on zapping garden bugs.

Cut through the red tape

Plagued by noisy neighbours? Drains starting to smell a bit iffy? Or perhaps you're suffering from bullying at work... The Citizens Advice Bureau (http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/) will be able to offer guidance on all sorts of civil and domestic dilemmas. There's heaps of useful stuff here, with information and advice on benefits, education, housing, family matters, consumer affairs and much more besides. And it's all written in reassuringly plain and simple English.

On a less official note, the good old BBC's Watchdog site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/watchdog) may be a bit preachy but is a great source for useful contacts, especially if you want to complain about something. If you have tripped on some paving stones and feel you are due some compensation, try Accident Line (http://www.accident-line.org.uk/) for all small claims queries.

And for the hypochondriacs out there, Patient UK at http://www.patient.co.uk/ is an excellent site whose aim is to provide non-medical people with information about health issues. It is well organised and easy on the eye, with hundreds of useful links to other sites under categories such as 'NHS, 'Private', 'GPs' and 'Complementary Medicine'.

To find out what the government and its various bodies are up to, visit http://www.open.gov.uk, where you will find links to local council websites, as well as various databases and information on tax, public records and all the different Government departments. For help with filling in your tax returns go directly to http://www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/home.htm, where you will find plenty of advice and can download forms.

Movin' on

If you need to get out and about then there are plenty of travel services on-line where you can book in advance or find out times, connections or directions before you set off. The Trainline at http://www.thetrainline.co.uk/ is run in association with Virgin, but will let you book tickets, reserve seats and find out train times for any train operator in the UK, although you have to register with them first. Railtrack's website at http://www.railtrack.com/ has an on-line booking service and timetables, as well as corporate information and travel news updates.

To hit the road, go to the well-structured National Express site at http://www.nationalexpress.co.uk/ for information on coach travel. It also contains news on discounts and details of land, sea and air connections. To travel in a bit more style, hire a motor on-line at Hertz's rather luridly-coloured site at http://www.hertz.co.uk or, for more general information about the state of the roads and traffic, visit either the RAC's website (http://www.rac.co.uk/) or the AA's (http://www.theaa.co.uk). Both offer traffic reports, route planners and advice on places to stay throughout the UK.

If you want to go your own way, Multimap (http://uk.multimap.com/map/) is a 'complete interactive atlas on the web!', where you can zoom in up to street level in London and get a pretty good idea of where you are elsewhere too.

The adventurous can book travel further afield with a 24-hour travel store, http://www.ebookers.com/, where you'll find stacks of discounted flights and holidays on offer.

Stay abreast of the news

Can't be bothered to pop out for the paper? All the respected broadsheets have an on-line presence these days, often with extra information that the paper version of the 'paper' doesn't include - and everything's handily archived too.

Even if you like to read a 'real' newspaper, it's useful to be able to save features that have caught your interest without having to get out the scissors. And with big, breaking stories their sites will often be updates more than once a day as the news comes in.

Check out The Electronic Telegraph at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/, The Independent at http://www.independent.co.uk/, The Electronic Herald at http://www.theherald.co.uk, and The Evening Standard at http://www.thisislondon.com/. The Guardian's site at http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/ is particularly good-looking and pleasant to browse, and has an excellent job search facility too. For quick news and weather reports, you can also try http://www.global.net.uk/.

If tabloids are your preferred reading matter, The Sun (http://www.thesun.co.uk/) and The Mirror (http://www.mirror.co.uk/) have colourful sites, but we won't tell you where you'll find The Sunday Sport!

Going out

Lastly, if you venture out, you'll want to know what's on, when and where. Scoot (http://www.scoot.co.uk/) has a fabulously simple search facility: type in what you're looking for (restaurant, nightclub) and where (Bath, Brighton) and up will pop your options, with contact details and distance in miles from where you specified. Scoot has its own cinema section too at http://www.cinema.scoot.c.uk/. If you're a theatre buff, try http://www.whatsonstage.com/. It has reviews as well as a search facility. And if you don't quite know what you want to do, Timeout at http://www.timeout.com/ and Event Selector at http://www.eventselector.co.uk/ can give you a flavour of what's happening.

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