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. 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.
   
     
   
   
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.   
   
       
   

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.

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.)

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