Customer Reviews

Encarta Reference Library 2004 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've tried both Encarta 2004 and Britannica 2004. As other reviews here pointed out, Britannica is also good, but the interface leaves a lot to be desired and program is very very sluggish. I'm on a 1.6Mhz Pentium 4 Windows XP system, with 1 gigabyte of memory. So I was a bit surprised how slow it was.

I decided to go with Encarta because it's faster, has more multimedia, and I like how Microsoft updates it (and displays a list of what was updated/added). I haven't tried the older versions of Encarta so I cannot compare, but 2004 looks and works fine for me. Some have complained about the Visual Browser "carousel" on the main page of the program. This can easily be disabled in the program options if it annoys you. The Encarta interface is very clean and organized. Colorful detailed buttons on the toolbar make it very easy to access the most common tasks and the search function is very fast. It seems the more you dig into it, the more goodies you'll find. There are great interactivities, games, dynamic atlas, 3D and 2D virtual tours, thousands of quotations, an entire dictionary program, and lots more. If you're used to the Internet Explorer browser, the "Favorites" menu in Encarta is identical and a great way to bookmark and organize your favorite places in this vast program. It's very easy to get "lost" for hours just clicking around.

I haven't looked through an encyclopedia on CD-ROM since the early 90's when CD-ROM technology was just starting to take off. I'm pleased to see how detailed and invaluable they've become. I'd recommend this to anyone.

The Dictionary/Thesaurus/Foreign Language Translator-
*The most comprehensive and extensive dictionary I've seen.
*Every word has an audible pronunciation.
*Translate any word in the dictionary to Spanish, French, German, and Italian (and vice verse) (no audio on foreign languages)
*Start typing what you believe the spelling of the word to be, and see a list of possibilities you might be thinking of.

The Atlas
*Find major highways in any part of the world.
*Find any city in the world, click on it, get it's content page which includes all references to said city
*Pull up the Dynamic Sensor and watch the lat/long time zone, and time of day go by
*Choose between the standard globe, the tectonic plate globe, the Religious Influence globe, the political influence globe, "Earth by Day" and "Earth at Night" globes are really cool. There's a globe of the moon which is equally as stunning. Those are just a few of the globe options.

There's tons of maps recent and historical.

THE Graphical User Interface
*A three year old could manage easily
*An adult would truly appreciate the simplicity of the GUI, not to mention how well it is all tied together.
*I sincerely appreciate the option of a full download. NO CD SWAPPING!
*Scroll mouse compatible

Photos and Maps and Sounds
*I didn't know the beating of Rodney King lasted that long...
*They've got Colin Powell on video giving a series of dissertations in regards to several aspects of the integration of the white and black person in earlier America. ("earlier" was not as long ago as we may like)
*They've got Kofi Annan (prime minister of the U.N.) to give a short talk on the situation in Africa.
*Countless still photos depicting history
*About 20 fully panoramic scenes (amazing)

THE TIMELINE
My personal favorite. The layout is simple and intuitive, the amount of at a glance world history is impressive.

Those are some of my favorite features, but there's a lot more: free updates, world statistics, the games, the ancient landmark tours you can take in full 3-d, the homework and research guides, literature guides (articles on pieces of literature), famous quotes that rivals the amount of words from their dictionary...

Oh and it's an encyclopedia.

I've not seen Encarta before so I have no idea about previous versions. However, this version is very impressive. I'm a computer professional and I can say that very few products have a user interface that 'flows' this well. My primary reason to get this was for my 10-year-old, but I think I'll be using it a lot more than her. The maps, dictionaries, articles, and links to related content on the web are great, but how they are all tied together is what really makes this product shine.

It does take a while to load and you want to install everything on your hard drive (about 2Gig). If you don't load everything to your disk then you'll wear out your arm swapping between the 5 CDs when you look at different articles.

I have bought both Encarta and Britannica for years (EB in printed edition too: 32 volumes, 32.000 sheets). This is my opinion in brief: Encarta is excellent in all aspects, but Britannica's authoritative text (sometimes outdated) makes interesting to buy both.
TEXT: Britannica is a superb encyclopedia in text (not in visual aid) since 1768 (you know: an article by Einstein and so on...). Text in electronic version differs from printed encyclopedia (very large articles have been shortened). Britannica claims that it has more items than 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.
In the other hand, Encarta's text is not bad at all. Most articles have the name of their contributors (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. The Pop-Up (double clicking a word) Dictionary and Thesaurus has sound for correct pronunciation (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: You can not find new files. Encarta can be updated free EVERY WEEK with new articles and additions or corrections to the old ones (till October 2004). With Encarta updating really works. Technically, is amazing to see the changes in old items.
ATLAS Britannica has not a real atlas; only a worlds map whose maximum detail is 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 types of atlas presentations (statistical ones can be counted by dozens). If you look 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. If it is a USA place, you can read the latest news.
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 worked 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. It has additional ways to find content, including subject or multimedia browsing, "related articles" and the standard A-Z method. 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 different. 2004 edition is better than 2003 one, but still it 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 fight 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.
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.

I bought this product for sheer curiousity and self-educational purposes. I was very impressed by the content and multimedia.

Something I would have liked for this product to do is pronounce words in spanish, german, french, italian, etc. It states on box that it pronounces words (in the same paragraph it says it translates between english, german, french, and italian, but fails to specify that it only pronounces words in english - a bit misleading).

I gave this digital encyclopedia only 4 stars because of it's questionable support. I thought that with microsoft being one of the largest profitable companies in the world that they could provide first rate support for it's customers. I learned that this isn't exactly the case (at least with my experience).
I ran into a problem with downloading the article updates as it would only begin the download and terminate a few minutes into it every time I tried for over a week, and did so at exactly the same spot every time. I contacted their support number (long distance and not toll-free), was on hold for a surprisingly short period of time before being connected to a live customer service rep who took my product ID # and gave me a case # before switching me over to tech support.
Then things got interesting.
For starters I couldn't understand the guy as he was foreign. As I explained the problem to him he started asking me if other things with my internet worked and if I could open web pages. I explained to him that everything does and that I was browsing their FAQ pertaining to this product before I had called. I don't think he understood as he kept questioning me about my internet connnection and I pointed out again I still had FAQ up on desktop. He then basically sugessted that I read through that and see if my problem was in there. I began reading off each of the FAQ's and pointing out at each one that it had nothing to do with my problem. I was getting pretty irritated at this point in the run-a-round as it became obvious that this guy had no clue as to how to help me.
After getting 3/4 of the way down the FAQ page he cuts me off and leads me to deleting my temporary internet pages and cookies, tells me to give it another try after doing that, and then takes my email address down saying he was going to send me more information as to how to deal with problem. And that was the end of that.
I still had the problem and never recieved any emails after 2 days of waiting. I called them back up and was swithced from friendly customer service to another tech support rep. This lady was not only foriegn, but sounded like she was talking through 4" of soundproofing material. Communicating was hopeless. After extensive effort she told me she was going to call right back. She called back later when I wasn't home and explained that my problem was due to the server being down (this is odd as I was able to begin the download) and then emailed me a couple times. I emailed her back, but the problem seems to be corrected for the time being as I was just able to download the updates after having product for nearly week and a half. Updates added 620 updates to articles and etc.

I'm glad I got this, but I will be wary of buying future microsoft products that may rely on an internet connection for some of it's features or may require high end technical support.

In my review for Encarta Deluxe 2004 my basic points were...
1. if you are a visual learner and not in upper division classes from High School onward Encarta has a great deal to offer at an attractive price.
2. if you need detailed articles Britianica is probably the better purchase as there are more subjects and more intensive treatment of them.

If you are still hovering on which to get and you do not need the kind of detail Britanica has you will appreciate this expanded Resource package. In Encarta Reference Library 2004 Microsoft pulls out all the multimedia stops and delivers a highly entertaining and educating encyclopedia that is a pleasure to simply roam around. The additional African Encyclopedia, Maps, extra content and lots of additonal useful information such as quotes and a very nice section on world musical instruments complete with the sound and ensemble works of these exotic instruments most of us otherwise would be unexposed to.

The dictionary and theasaurus are suited to the content and tie in nicely with the standard information. The result is a rich and involving multimedia learning experience. That makes Encarta Reference Library 2004 indespensible for casual and younger readers. While it is a nice gesture including the African Encarta the extra detail paid Africa at times seems disproportionate in it's importance compared to the rest of the reference libraries content.

While this may be an unpopular thing to say it is almost verging on political correctness. While I applaud a deeper, and to some degree necesary involvement of African cultues contribution to the world I would have liked seeing a bit more attention paid the existing areas that are a little underdeveloped like political science, world history and the sciences.

This is a minor quibble and the material on Africa is exceptionally well produced. Still, I think I'd rather hear and read more of Dr. King and Malcom X, or more detail about the Chicago 7 trial. No matter what, if you enjoy this well rounded multimedia experience. It is hard to imagine almost anyone not impressed with this exceptional program.

This is the one edition that my father will give me, Amazon.com staff. This powerful encyclopedia has it all: Encyclopedia and atlas on one product. Previously, if you wanted to see all countries, you had to buy the atlas separately. But, from 2000 on, Atlas and Encyclopedia have bundled up since the 2000 edition. This new bundle is what we actually know as Encarta Reference Library, and this new edition incorporates 20 Discovery Channel videos, a feature that wasn't found in prevous editions.

Moreover, I want to congratulate the people at Microsoft Corporation for creating this new version of an exciting product.
And, Mr. Gates, you can include this review on the side of the 2006 edition packaging.

Thank you for reading,
Marcelo Mauricio

Encarta is good. It is very easy to use. It has a web site that a registered user could access. Its world map is far superior than the Encyclopaedia Britannica's. However, its contents are sometimes not that good.

For example, I searched "John Rawls," a prominent moral and political philosopher, today. Its first line reads:

[ Rawls, John (1921-), American moral and political philosopher, whose major work, A Theory of Justice, has had a profound impact on ethics and political theory since its publication in 1971. ]

For God's sake, Rawls died on Nov 22, 2002. It's March 21, 2004 today. And Encarta, which supposedly should be updated weekly, did nothing to correct this mistake.

I usually only write reviews when I have postive comments, but I was disappointed in this years version of Encarta. It has very few improvements or new features.
Although the content will always remains secondary to the real encyclopedia publishers. I always enjoyed seeing what new flashy features Microsoft has come up with... (and 10 new videos was not good enough for me).

There is no question that this is the best functioning encyclopedia (at least if you are using Windows and other Microsoft products) but without any new flash... and considering the nature of the content I can not recommend anyone purchase this product (and will probably see if I can return mine).

Encarta's interface has for years been much better than Britannica's, but this year's edition (2004) is different. In one word: horrible!

Bill Gates and Co. put not only a very loud welcome noise (you should always turn your speakers off before running Encarta), but also a FAST MOVING CARROUSEL of pictures on your screen. There is no use of it except that you quickly get a SEVERE HEADACHE or VERTIGO looking at it. And there is no way to turn this monstrous thing off!

So, if you already have a not too old copy of Encarta on your computer, and you are not a caroussel maniac or a two or three years old child, better SKIP 2004 CAROUSSEL EDITION of Encarta and WAIT FOR A NORMAL EDITION.