Thursday 26 March 2009

Economic Times Crossword Online

The Economic Times daily crossword does not have the most user-friendly online access, as those of us who've tried to locate it on ET's website have discovered. I'm putting up the steps with illustrations to get the ET cryptic crossword online. Trust this helps to answer the "how to get the grid" questions from the Hindu/ET solving community.

Find & Print The Crossword

  1. ET-epaper-choose-edition Go to the epaper site of the Times group: http://epaper.timesofindia.com. Choose edition as The Economic Times and city of publication that you're looking for, and click "Submit". (Note: Different cities carry different crossword numbers. The Mumbai edition is ahead of the others in its crossword sequence; that's the one followed on the ET solving community.)

  2. You'll reach the ET homepage. Click Search on the header. This will open a small popup search window[*]. Retain the option "This Newspaper" to view the same day's crossword, or change to "Whole week" to see the whole week's crosswords. Enter Text as "crossword" and hit the Search button.

    ET-epaper-search  

  3. The search results will show the links to the crossword pages, with their dates. Click the link you were looking for; it will open the crossword in a popup window[*]. Click on the Print option to take a print, or the E-mail option to send it by email.   

    ET-epaper-searchbox    

Link To The Grid

Since the crossword is displayed in a popup window, the link (URL) for it isn't there on the address bar if you're using IE. Here's how to link to the exact image of the grid. This will come in handy if you want to share the link with others or when the Print option for the crossword isn’t working (which happens quite often!) - you can print the grid image directly in that case.

For Internet Explorer: In the popup window, right-click on the grid and choose the option Properties. A small window will appear; the Address (URL) field there has the direct link to the grid. e.g. The link for today's crossword ET 4196 is http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/getimage.dll?path=ETM/2009/03/26/13/Img/Ar0130400.png.

ET-epaper-get-image-IE

For Firefox: The same as IE, but there's also a shortcut menu option Copy Image Location which copies the URL in a single step.
For Chrome: Similar to Firefox, the shortcut menu option is called Copy Image URL.

[*]Note: If the popup window does not open when you click on the crossword, it is possible that the browser's popup blocker is enabled. This needs to be turned off for the ET website. Search for "how to disable popup blocker" to fix this in your browser.

Enjoy solving, with the grid!
(Update: Step 2 revised. Thanks Bhargav for the suggestion.)

If you wish to keep track of further articles on Crossword Unclued, you can subscribe to it in a reader via RSS Feed. You can also subscribe by email and have articles delivered to your inbox.

15 comments

Anonymous said...

Thank you Shuchi for this very clear explanation and most for the footnote. For me the popup window never opened earlier, I had to strain hard to see the grid. I have changed the popup blocker setting and it opens now, I can fully view the grid and print it too.

C.G. BHARGAV said...

Instead of browsing page by page, one could click the search option and type "Crossword". The link will show up. This saves quite some time.

Shuchi said...

Thanks Bhargav. I'll update the post to include that.

anokha said...

Thanks, Shuchi - will start attempting this, time permitting!

http://anokha-etcrossword.blogspot.com/

Shuchi said...

Hi Anokha, Welcome to my blog (first time you've commented here I think?) and I'm glad this post has got you interested in the ET crossword. I'm sure you'll enjoy solving it.

prashanth said...

starting up something here: http://crypticross.wordpress.com/

this is for the bangalore edition of et.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this. Any idea how to get archives beyond 1 week? The epaper search allows you to get crosswords for a max of 1 week.

Shuchi said...

Hello Anon,

To get the archives beyond a week, when you're at step 2, click the date dropdown to the left of the Search field. It'll list dates for a week, and the last option is "Before [date of a week ago]". This is the one to choose - it will take you to "archive online".

Click on tab Search in "archive online", fill in the search details with "crossword" as the word to look for. This will get you the crossword for dates in the past.

Venkatesh said...

Here is a simple short cut (just a few clicks) that I use. On the ET opening page, in the headings, if we pause the cursor over 'Editorial', we get the page number. On the page numbers below that, click on the number after the Editorial page (i.e., Editorial page number + 1). This directly takes us to the page with the Crossword.
Then we can either click on the CW itself (or on the content heading on the right - crossword). CW appears in the box below. If we click on the right icon above the CW, we get it in full screen.

Jnan said...

Hi Shuchi, thanks very much for your detailed instructions, they were helpful in printing the crossword. However, I personally find printing wasteful and redundant for an online crossword! You may know that many years ago ET crossword was actually interactive like, say, the Guardian crossword today. One could click on a row or column and see only the relevant clue displayed, then fill in the answer and validate it! Any idea why this feature was abandoned. It would make so much more sense to do everything online.

Shuchi said...

Hi Jnan, I didn't know the ET crossword was ever interactive! I've been looking up their puzzle online since 2007 or so. An interactive ET grid is a great idea. I know some who would solve crosswords if they only didn't have to take a print-out.

Padmanabhan said...

Shuchi,
Interactive version of ET cryptic is posted daily at 10.30 am with links to find def. & solution by one Mr.Parthasarathy- just like Col. does for TH. The only difference is that you may click the link to 'solution' if you want to check. It is available here-

http://sparthasarathy.biz/crosswords/economictimes/et31122016.html

Padmanabhan

Gautam Brahma said...

The crossword has been missing in the Delhi edition of ET for two days : August 15 and 16. Has it been stopped?

Shuchi said...

Hi Gautam, I heard of the missing ET crossword via twitter. Let's hope this is a temporary phase. In any case ET was recycling its old crosswords, due to which many regular solvers had quit solving it. Will be a real pity if they stop the crossword for good.

DaTishman said...

Hi Guys!!!

Anyone have an idea about how to access the older crosswords? Was using the above link for years & suddenly last few days it doesn't seem to work anymore?? PLEASE HELP!!