New tool lets Data Members sift through Crain database, build their own lists

For decades, Crain's Cleveland Business has published lists ranking the largest companies across various industries and categories.

Now you can build your own lists using that same data.

Last week Crain's gave our Data Center a major upgrade, releasing new tools designed to help you slice and dice the data we gather for those lists.

The first upgrade: At the top of the Data Center — located at CrainsCleveland.com/data-lists — you'll see our new custom search tool, which lets you build your own lists using filters such as company size, industry, executive title and more.

With that search tool you can download every company in our database with the push of a button, and then you can flip to an executive view and download another spreadsheet containing thousands of local, C-level executives. You can also build a much narrower list to suit your needs by searching for, say, CFOs at manufacturing companies with more than $100 million in revenue. That search tool is available exclusively to Crain's Data Members.

We also are now offering interactive versions of the lists that run in the print edition. With a Data Membership, you can now search a list by keyword, create charts or rerank the list by any criteria that appears in the column headers simply by clicking on them. And of course Data Members can still download lists in PDF or Excel format (the Excel lists often include more companies, more executives and more contact information than the lists that run in print).

Data from those lists is now being woven into news stories as well. To demonstrate: In this sentence, do you see how the name of Progressive Corp. is underlined? Hover over it with your mouse (or if you're on a mobile device, click on it).

The information box that popped up is designed to give you a quick snapshot of any company ranked on one of our lists — what they do, contact info, related articles and links to relevant lists in the Crain Data Center. You'll notice that some executives names are underlined as well. For instance, a data snapshot will pop up if you move your cursor over the name Craig Arnold, who is CEO of Eaton (which has its own data snapshot).

Even if you're not yet a Crain's Data Member, you can view the information in the data snapshots as you read stories on our site. But to unlock the full value of the Crain's Data Center — whether for lead generation, market research or other business intelligence needs — upgrade to the full Data Membership, which also includes a Crain's subscription.

Visit CrainsCleveland.com/data-lists to browse through the Data Center, and to learn more visit our Data Membership FAQ page.