Customer Reviews

2003 Guide to Federal Grants and Government Assistance to Small Business: Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, Loans, Grants, Surplus Equipment, SBA, GSA, SEC Information for Entrepreneurs, Startup Kit, Loan Programs, Financing, Law, Regulations, Reports, Workbooks Applying for Federal Assistance (CD-ROM)

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Not only is all of this info available online, but the CD gives you a collection of non-indexed, gigantically HUGE Acrobat PDF files, some about 100MB in size. Navigating a 5MB text PDF is painfully slow - try 100 MB. Finding what you're seeking is practically impossible, and navigating PDFs of that size takes an eternity. Even a fast machine takes a couple minutes just to load the files into Acrobat, never mind doing searches, etc.

If they had broken up the files and named them logically (instead of titles like A1, B1, etc.), and provided some kind of indexing application or document that would point you to specifically what you wanted, then, yes, it might be handy to have. Otherwise, go online, and find answers 100 times more quickly. This is a ridiculously poorly done CD-ROM in this day and age. Big waste of $, in my opinion. If you have a slower/older computer without much memory, you'd REALLY want to avoid this thing like the plague.

This CD-ROM is not produced by the Federal Government. Hence, the by-line should not be U.S. Federal Government. This book simply borrows -- 'rips-off'is a better word - FREE materials of the Federal Government and compiled them into a CD-ROM. In fact, what you will see in the CD-ROM are EXACT pages of various federal-owned web sites, such as the Small Business Administration.

Instead of buying the CD-ROM, simply go to the various government sites such as SBA.gov and CFDA.gov.

This disc contains pdf files downloaded from government web pages. Save yourself the money and go to the SBA, GSA, SEC web pages yourself and look up the information that is relevant to you.

The CDROM is essentially a dump of the information found on government websites such as SBA, SEC, etc.

The information is voluminous so if you have a slow modem, there may be some value in purchasing the info on the CDROM for the sake of having it consolidated in one place. You will learn little new if you have already been to the websites.

Also, some of the links on the CDROM do not work properly. You open the page in Adobe Acrobat and receive and error message saying the page has to be opened in a browser. You open the page in a browser and you get a message saying the page has to be opened in Adobe Acrobat.

That kind of foolishness more or less sums up the value of the CDROM from my perspective.

Save yourself a lot of money and time ... just visit your local NonProfit Resource Center. These CD's are direct burns from government websites with a cheap case and covers. I got them and returned them the same day.

I got the grant that I needed to start my own busniess. It is great