Encarta Premium Suite 2004 CD Edition
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Manufacturer: Microsoft
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: CD-ROM
Brand: Microsoft
EAN: 0805529363038
Label: Microsoft
Model: 805529363038
Number Of Items: 1
Platform: Windows 98
Publisher: Microsoft
Release Date: 2003-09-05
Studio: Microsoft
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: ENCARTA UK versus BRITANNICA (only USA edition)
Comment: I have bought both Encarta and Britannica for years (EB in printed edition too: 32 volumes, 32.000 pages). This is my opinion in brief: Encarta UK is excellent in all aspects, but Britannica's authoritative text (USA focused and sometimes outdated) makes interesting to buy both.
TEXT: Britannica is a superb encyclopedia of text (not in visual aid) since 1768 (you know: an article by Einstein and so on...). Since 1901 is published in USA (University of Chicago) and is VERY USA FOCUSED. Unlike Encarta, EB has not a UK edition. Contents in electronic version differs from printed encyclopedia (very large articles have been shortened). Britannica claims that it has more entries that Encarta, but this is a joke: articles like "Mexico" are only one (with a lot of subdivisions) in Encarta, while in Britannica subdivisions are unconnected, and you must "jump" from one subdivision to another, which is slow and very annoying, especially if you want to copy it in "WORD". Very often, the text is not updated. Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite has "3 encyclopedias in one: Elementary, Student and Adult".
On the other hand, Encarta's UK text (Premium Suite) is not bad at all. Most articles have the name of their contributors and their professions, works...: They are not "John Doe". You can find large fragments of literary works, literature guides, a lot of sidebars and thousands of quotations. "Encarta Africana" is included only in USA version. The Pop-Up (double clicking a word) Dictionary and Thesaurus has sound for correct pronunciation only in USA edition (by the way, it can read aloud, with a robotic and ugly voice, a whole article). The "Translation Dictionaries" to Spanish, French, German and Italian must be improved, because they are minimal. It gives you a lot of "Internet links", even if you are not connected. With Britannica you must be "on-line" and it searches in an EB Web page.
In theory you can update Britannica over the Internet free for a year quarterly (4 times), but this does not work. Encarta can be updated free EVERY MONTH (USA version every week) with new articles and additions or corrections to the old ones (until October 2004). With Encarta updating really works. Technologically is amazing to see the changes in old items.
ATLAS Britannica has not a real atlas; only a worlds map whose maximum detail are the States of USA. Statistics are very poor. Encarta's Atlas is like another encyclopedia, with a great detail (1 cm = 4 km all over the world) and 20 varieties of atlas presentations (statistical ones can be counted by dozens). If you look at a geographical article (city, river...) you can see in a corner where it is placed and, with only a click, open the Atlas. In articles of cities, if you are on-line, you can see in another corner the weather of this place in that moment.
MULTIMEDIA: They say that "serious" or "adult" readers do not care about "pictures"; that multimedia is only for kids. I do not agree, because I think that, sometimes, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Works of art, anatomy, historical maps, diagrams... Encarta devastates Britannica with a lot of photos, paintings, drawings, charts & tables, animations, interactivities, videos, music and sounds, pictures, 2-D and 3-D virtual tours, 360-degrees views, timeline, games... It is not only the quantity and quality. It is the easy access you have to all the multimedia, and that text and multimedia are fully integrated. Britannica is not really multimedia. It has photos and videos, but they make the program slow and sluggish. They should edit an alternative version with only text, as they did with the first edition in 1995. It performed fast and easy in old computers.
INTERFACE AND PERFORMANCE: This is the worst side of Britannica. With Encarta you only have to type a word or the beginning of a word to see all the articles and multimedia that contain it. If Encarta does not find anything, it gives you automatically alternative spellings. Even if you write the name of a small village lost in any country, you see it in the atlas. If you need to copy text or pictures, the integration with Microsoft WORD is perfect. The "Research Organizer" is very helpful too. Encarta's TEXT FONT is very clear (Britannica's...) and you can choose 3 sizes.
Navigating with Britannica is disappointing. I will only give you an example: if you do not know the exact and correct spelling of a name or word, it does not help you with similar spellings (unless you open a window and "battle" with it). As I said before, the program's performance speed is very slow and sluggish, and it must be dramatically improved. To go "back and forward" you do not find any icon and you need to open a "menu".... One "pro" for Britannica: they say it works with Macintosh.
INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS: Encarta has a lot in different languages. The four I utilize (United Kingdom, Spanish, French and Italian ones) are adaptations of USA version, which is inexorable talking about History, Geography, Literature and other topics. The MISERABLE thing is that articles that equally concern any human being (Health, Mathematics and the rest of Sciences) are a VERY RESUMED translation of USA edition that is, of course, the best of all. Why Microsoft follows such a policy?
I repeat my modest piece of advice: Encarta is excellent in all aspects, but Britannica's authoritative text (sometimes outdated) make interesting to buy both.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Encarta 2004 - The Ultimate Computer Encyclopaedia
Comment: Bigger and better than previous editions. This surpasses its predecessors by far with a greater volume of information. This contains not only an encyclopaedia complete with media, but also a thesaurus, atlas and dictionary, making it the complete reference library.
The media, comprising of audio clips and video sequences, is of a very high quality, all accompanied by informative captions. There are links to websites for further research. These work, I've tried them!
So, I highly recommend this software for any school child, student, or simply to replace several heavy encyclopaedia volumes.
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Editorial Reviews: |
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Customer Rating:
Summary: ENCARTA UK versus BRITANNICA (only USA edition)
Comment: I have bought both Encarta and Britannica for years (EB in printed edition too: 32 volumes, 32.000 pages). This is my opinion in brief: Encarta UK is excellent in all aspects, but Britannica's authoritative text (USA focused and sometimes outdated) makes interesting to buy both.
TEXT: Britannica is a superb encyclopedia of text (not in visual aid) since 1768 (you know: an article by Einstein and so on...). Since 1901 is published in USA (University of Chicago) and is VERY USA FOCUSED. Unlike Encarta, EB has not a UK edition. Contents in electronic version differs from printed encyclopedia (very large articles have been shortened). Britannica claims that it has more entries that Encarta, but this is a joke: articles like "Mexico" are only one (with a lot of subdivisions) in Encarta, while in Britannica subdivisions are unconnected, and you must "jump" from one subdivision to another, which is slow and very annoying, especially if you want to copy it in "WORD". Very often, the text is not updated. Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite has "3 encyclopedias in one: Elementary, Student and Adult".
On the other hand, Encarta's UK text (Premium Suite) is not bad at all. Most articles have the name of their contributors and their professions, works...: They are not "John Doe". You can find large fragments of literary works, literature guides, a lot of sidebars and thousands of quotations. "Encarta Africana" is included only in USA version. The Pop-Up (double clicking a word) Dictionary and Thesaurus has sound for correct pronunciation only in USA edition (by the way, it can read aloud, with a robotic and ugly voice, a whole article). The "Translation Dictionaries" to Spanish, French, German and Italian must be improved, because they are minimal. It gives you a lot of "Internet links", even if you are not connected. With Britannica you must be "on-line" and it searches in an EB Web page.
In theory you can update Britannica over the Internet free for a year quarterly (4 times), but this does not work. Encarta can be updated free EVERY MONTH (USA version every week) with new articles and additions or corrections to the old ones (until October 2004). With Encarta updating really works. Technologically is amazing to see the changes in old items.
ATLAS Britannica has not a real atlas; only a worlds map whose maximum detail are the States of USA. Statistics are very poor. Encarta's Atlas is like another encyclopedia, with a great detail (1 cm = 4 km all over the world) and 20 varieties of atlas presentations (statistical ones can be counted by dozens). If you look at a geographical article (city, river...) you can see in a corner where it is placed and, with only a click, open the Atlas. In articles of cities, if you are on-line, you can see in another corner the weather of this place in that moment.
MULTIMEDIA: They say that "serious" or "adult" readers do not care about "pictures"; that multimedia is only for kids. I do not agree, because I think that, sometimes, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Works of art, anatomy, historical maps, diagrams... Encarta devastates Britannica with a lot of photos, paintings, drawings, charts & tables, animations, interactivities, videos, music and sounds, pictures, 2-D and 3-D virtual tours, 360-degrees views, timeline, games... It is not only the quantity and quality. It is the easy access you have to all the multimedia, and that text and multimedia are fully integrated. Britannica is not really multimedia. It has photos and videos, but they make the program slow and sluggish. They should edit an alternative version with only text, as they did with the first edition in 1995. It performed fast and easy in old computers.
INTERFACE AND PERFORMANCE: This is the worst side of Britannica. With Encarta you only have to type a word or the beginning of a word to see all the articles and multimedia that contain it. If Encarta does not find anything, it gives you automatically alternative spellings. Even if you write the name of a small village lost in any country, you see it in the atlas. If you need to copy text or pictures, the integration with Microsoft WORD is perfect. The "Research Organizer" is very helpful too. Encarta's TEXT FONT is very clear (Britannica's...) and you can choose 3 sizes.
Navigating with Britannica is disappointing. I will only give you an example: if you do not know the exact and correct spelling of a name or word, it does not help you with similar spellings (unless you open a window and "battle" with it). As I said before, the program's performance speed is very slow and sluggish, and it must be dramatically improved. To go "back and forward" you do not find any icon and you need to open a "menu".... One "pro" for Britannica: they say it works with Macintosh.
INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS: Encarta has a lot in different languages. The four I utilize (United Kingdom, Spanish, French and Italian ones) are adaptations of USA version, which is inexorable talking about History, Geography, Literature and other topics. The MISERABLE thing is that articles that equally concern any human being (Health, Mathematics and the rest of Sciences) are a VERY RESUMED translation of USA edition that is, of course, the best of all. Why Microsoft follows such a policy?
I repeat my modest piece of advice: Encarta is excellent in all aspects, but Britannica's authoritative text (sometimes outdated) make interesting to buy both.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Encarta 2004 - The Ultimate Computer Encyclopaedia
Comment: Bigger and better than previous editions. This surpasses its predecessors by far with a greater volume of information. This contains not only an encyclopaedia complete with media, but also a thesaurus, atlas and dictionary, making it the complete reference library.
The media, comprising of audio clips and video sequences, is of a very high quality, all accompanied by informative captions. There are links to websites for further research. These work, I've tried them!
So, I highly recommend this software for any school child, student, or simply to replace several heavy encyclopaedia volumes.
As its name suggests, the Encarta 2004 Premium Suite CD Edition is the top-end edition of Microsoft's pace-setting multimedia encyclopaedia. It includes over 130,000 articles, 24,000 photos and illustrations, more than 3,000 sound and music clips, 1.8 million map locations and more than 260 videos and animations. You'll start at Encarta's homepage where searching for a specific word or phrase brings up a list of suggestions in the left hand column. Click on one of these and the item itself appears in the main window. For example, searching for Vancouver Island returns a selection of articles on the subject itself, related articles on temperate rainforests, deforestation, lumberjacks and Sir Francis Drake, as well as a key event list for Captain Cook (who visited the island in 1778). Cross-referencing is particularly strong, and as well as web-style links within the text that let you jump to other parts of the encyclopaedia, many articles list associated multimedia elements, such as sound and video clips, as well as links to those websites that have been assessed by Encarta's editors. (Where no Editor's Choices exist, you can easily do a general web search.) Articles can also be browsed in alphabetical order or by country and by clicking the Article Outline you can see the main headings of longer articles and jump straight to the sections that interest you. You can also browse maps, multimedia, statistics and around 18,000 websites in the same way. Navigation is excellent, thanks to the familiar web browser-style controls for moving back and forth between recently viewed screens or going straight to the program's opening homepage, and there's a useful drop-down 'history' menu so you can jump straight back to any of the last 29 pages you've visited. You can also build a list of 'favourites' which is useful if you're researching a subject over a longer period of time. Encarta makes it easy to copy both text and pictures into a word package, such as Microsoft Word and adds the relevant copyright notices automatically. This edition improves on Encarta Encyclopedia Plus 2004 in a number of significant ways; by adding a world English dictionary and thesaurus, bilingual dictionaries (French, Spanish, German and Italian) thousands of quotations, a huge world atlas, a collection of study aids to help with homework, six 'virtual' aeroplane flights over different continents, and a selection of videos from the Discovery Channel; in all, it has around three times as much content. With its extensive content and study aids, excellent multimedia and free updates, Encarta 2004 Premium Suite CD Edition sets the standard for multimedia encyclopaedias. Note: all the features mentioned above are also available for Encarta Encyclopedia 2004 Premium Suite CD version with the exception of the six virtual flights and extra Discovery Channel videos. --Rob Beattie
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