Gommunications innovations are transforming our industty

I NTRODUCING the latest develop- I ments in CD ROM and fax technology to the building materials business is fast improving communications with suppliers, customers and prospects.

CD ROM resembles a musical compact disc but stores data, text, images, graphics, audio and video. With its drive connected to the PC. a CD ROM holds many times the information captured on a typical computer disc and data may be retrieved almost instantaneously. Up to 300,000 pages can be searched for exact. detailed information in seconds.

The North American Forest Products Almanac CD ROM from Optical Data Systems Inc., Seattle, Wa., contains nearly 13,000 listings for all primary and secondary wood products producers in the U.S. and Canada, including wholesalers, distributors, remanufacturers, cofinnodity brokers, rail reloaders, exporters, importers, associations and consultants.

Query search permits up to 125 field parameters on any listing, so, for example, on a single search you could locate all the companies in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina selling l"x4"xI2" surfaced southern yellow pine with paper wrap and shipped by

Story at a Glance

High tech communications systems save time, money, improveservice HowaCD ROM directory, fax buying/ selling network, fax document interchange program work.

rail. The Almanac is updated every six months.

The system can also create mailing labels and mail merge form letters for instant print out on desktop printers. Tabulated search results can be instantly viewed as text, bar graphs, pie charts or tables. Users need only an IBM or compatible personal computer with 2 meg of memory and a hard drive.

Full motion video and audio ("multimedia") capabilities allow advertisers to insert video messages or still images along withtheircompany's listing or in a video "yellow pages" section.

Now in development arc the L992 Intemational Forest Products CD ROM, which includes 25 years ofannual data on imports and exports, for both vol-

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