Customer Reviews

Microsoft Encarta Reference Library 2003 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I buy ENCARTA every year, and BRITANNICA from time to time. This is my opinion:
TEXT: Britannica's writing style is more sophisticated, and its authors are very well known. However, Encarta is not bad written at all, its authors are good and the contents are more or less the same, or better in the last versions.
You can update Britannica over the Internet free for a year, but only quarterly (4 times). Encarta is updated EVERY WEEK with new articles and additions to the old ones.
MULTIMEDIA and FEATURES: Encarta devastates Britannica with a lot of animations, interactivities, videos, music and sounds, pictures, literature sidebars, new translation dictionaries, Atlas, 2 D and 3 D virtual tours, timeline, games ... It's not only the quantity and quality. It is the easy access you have to all the multimedia, and that text, multimedia and features are completely integrated.
NAVIGATING: Encarta wins again. You only have to type a phrase, a word or de beginning of a word to see all the articles and multimedia that contains it. If you have typed the name of a small village lost in Senegal (e.g.), you see it in the Atlas without clicking again. If Encarta does not find anything, it gives you alternative spellings and you meet with what was looking for. To go "jumping" from article to article is very easy and quick, because you have a lot of links and the "Related Articles" section. If you need to copy text or pictures, the integration with Microsoft's WORD is perfect.
Navigating with Britannica is different. You do not get crazy, but ... I only say that, if you do not know the exact and correct spelling of a name or word, it does not help you with alternative or similar spellings.
My computer is Pentium III 1000 Mhz 256 RAM, and I have copied Britannica into the hard drive (the same with Encarta). The fact is that it is very slow, and that takes a lot of RAM (50 % more or less). If you have other programs open, perhaps Britannica does not work. With Encarta, you do not have any problem.
I hope my opinion is helpful for you.

I know that most folks "outgrow" encyclopedias around high school. While encyclopedias are great for little kids writing reports, they're just not useful enough, detailed enough, or comprehensive enough for adults. That said, Encarta 2003 is still a great all-around reference source for all ages.

To me, the World Atlas is worth the price of the suite alone. It's insanely detailed with 1.8 million places. You can get anywhere by just spinning the globe around with your mouse, then using your mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Speaking of which, you can zoom in insanely close (to the point where small villages listed start appearing on the map). That makes it incredibly fun just to pick a country at random to explore in detail.

The encyclopedia section of the suite is also very well done, plus it's updated on a weekly basis. Once again, it's just fun to browse subjects at random and then click on related links to just keep the adventure going. There are tons of multimedia extras such as tens of thousands of photos, graphs, charts... you name it.

The only real weakness is the Encarta Dictionary, which won't be mistaken for the Oxford English Dictionary anytime soon. Encarta is the most basic of dictionaries. Definitions are not as comprehensive as they should be; words that should have several definitions only have one in Encarta. So if all you're looking for in a dictionary is correct spelling, I suppose Encarta does the job. But if you're looking for something to use for serious etymology, or if you want a heavyweight dictionary in general, Encarta Dictionary is not up to snuff and it is not even close to being in the same class as the OED.

Okay, that nitpick aside, I've saved the best part of Encarta 2003 for last... You can save the entire program to your hard drive (provided you have 3 GB to spare). That means you no longer need to insert the DVD disc into your computer. To me, the biggest hassle of using Encarta in the past was having to dig up the DVD disk and then swapping it with the disk currently in my computer. And if all I was looking for was just one article, it was frankly easier just to open up a web browser and search the Internet. Now, I don't need to sweat it, because all of Encarta is stored locally on my hard drive. That means browsing just got a ton easier since I can launch the program anytime, even when I'm listening to a music CD in my DVD drive.

So yeah, you may have outgrown encyclopedias years ago, but Encarta is still a great reference tool to have on your system.

My test run with Encarta was a search for information about Mary, Queen of Scots. The subject is on the obscure side, so I was delighted and surprised to find information enough to support a college-level essay, bibliography included.

Encarta's library includes a "talking" dictionary of English, which is quite good enough for ordinary purposes. Pronunciations are typically American. I run it minimized, while writing, for easy reference. English-Foreign Language translation dictionaries are included, too. The languages available are French, German, Spanish and Italian, but the vocabularies are not comprehensive and there are no pronunciation guides. A Thesaurus and a Book of Quotations are tacked on, also, but neither is first rate.

Much is made of the World Atlas, and I agree that it is very good for large land masses. For local maps, it falls short of other programs that the Internet makes available at no cost. A redeeming feature is that the world's large cities are shown in considerable detail.

A feature called "Researcher" is designed to let a student collect, organize and compose term papers and the like. It should be a godsend to any undergraduate who seeks to maximize literary production while minimizing literary effort.

In sum, I intend to keep and use the program. For most purposes it is sufficient and it is an excellent starting point for scholarly research at any level.

It can be installed directly on a hard drive, if there are three gigabytes of space to spare. I did that and have been rewarded by quicker access to information and liberation from CD manipulation. If you choose to follow in my footsteps, be sure to defragment your hard drive afterwards. The installation wizard really leaves a mess!

Wugo

I've been a user of Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedias since 1997, and I think that the Microsoft Encarta Reference Library 2003 DVD is a dream come true product! The 97 edition of Encarta was impressive however very limited by the small amount of storage space the regular CD provided. In their 2000 edition they committed the horrid mistake of expanding the encyclopedia into two CDs. Articles are stored on both CDs so you didn't have to switch them if you're just reading text, however if you wanted to open a multimedia attachment most probably you would've had to switch CDs. That was very frustrating and I hated the Encarta and stopped using it. The updates were a bit worthless as well because they weren't integrated into the encyclopedia's articles, but instead were provided as a separate section called updates! Very useless!

But in 2003, all those mistakes were overcome with intelligence and style! The DVD provides a vast amount of storage space that you rarely find an article of significant importance without a couple of multimedia attachments. Only now I realize how the need to switch CDs did impact the appeal of the previous encyclopedia, for now whenever I'm bored I just slip the DVD in and browse.

The updates are just wonderful! Almost every week you have about 500K of new updates available for download, and they integrate seamlessly with your existing articles. This is a REAL up-to-date encyclopedia. For example, only one week after the Columbia shuttle disaster, I opened the Space Shuttle article in my encyclopedia and found a whole section about the Columbia disaster and its possible effects on space exploration programs! That's what I call an updating encyclopedia! And for those interested to know what updates they have downloaded so far there is still that section where it will provide you links to updated and newly added articles.

I'm an average user who has an interest in almost every science on earth. I read a lot and I'm not usually satisfied with short essays or fragments of information. This encyclopedia provides me everything I'm looking for! The essays are comprehensive and the search tools are very efficient and helpful. However if you're a NASA scientist and is looking for an integrity assessment of the ecncylopedia's quantum physics articles then I can't really help you with that! You might want to read what your colleagues wrote about this product.

And if you're among those who claim that multimedia content is for children only then you probably haven't used this encyclopedia and you're still reading from your old fashion 200000000 pages dust-collecting books! You probably haven't used the 3-D virtual tour of Abu-Simbel shrine in Ancient Egypt where you can observe the scripts on every wall in complete detail. You probably haven't enjoyed the beauty of the 2-D pictures of Pompeii where you can even lie to your friends and tell them that you were actually there. I can also bet that you haven't tried the time-line feature which is nothing less than a spectacular tool for history buffs like me.

Another feature that I discovered recently is the World Atlas. In previous encyclopedias, this used to be a boring feature that merely provided limited geographical information. This however is a treasure of information! It will provide you visual maps or charts of all statistical studies and known facts you can dream of! Everything you wanted to know about global climate, population, economic, political, or religious data is available in detail and up to date!

In short, I received this DVD a month ago and until now I keep discovering new features that make me appreciate it even more and feel better and better about the money I spent on this invaluable software. I wholeheartedly recommend buying it! Enjoy!

I've bought both ENCARTA and BRITANNICA for years. This is my opinion:
TEXT: The Britannica is a superb encyclopaedia in text since 1768. If only its electronic version were worthy of it! Text in the electronic version is different from Printed Encyclopaedia (large articles have been shortened). Britannica claims that it has more articles than Encarta, but this is a joke: articles like "Spain", are only one with a lot of subdivisions in Encarta, while in Britannica subdivisions are considered articles, and you must "jump" from one subdivision to other.
In some areas Encarta is better than Britannica. For example consider "controversial events in modern history" such us "My Lai Massacre": In Encarta one large article and a lot of mentions in others; Britannica does not even know the name.
In theory, you can update Britannica over the Internet free for a year quarterly (4 times), but this does not work. Encarta is updated free EVERY WEEK) with new articles and additions to the old ones. The new articles and additions are included in the next version of Encarta, but this is not true for Britannica. For instance: "Bilbao, Spain": Britannica does not mention the Guggenheim Museum, which opened in 1997, and the population is !!estimated!! of 1982. The same article in Encarta: similar text, 3 photos, 1 map, related articles, sidebar, dynamic timelines and 4 internet pages, plus one specific article "Bilbao Guggenheim Museum". I think Britannica updates its contents very slow, whereas Encarta is completely alive.
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, maps, diagrams ... Encarta devastates Britannica with a lot of photos, paintings, drawings, maps, animations, interactivities, videos, music and sounds, pictures, literature sidebars, new translation dictionaries (not very good though), atlas, 2-D and 3-D virtual tours, timeline, games ... It's 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's Atlas is a joke and statistics do not exist or I have not found them. Encarta's has a great detail: 1 cm/ 4 km all over the world (though you find some mistakes) and hundreds of statistical maps.
INTERFACE AND SOFTWARE: This is the worst side of Britannica. In Encarta you only have to type a phrase, a word or the beginning of a word to see all the articles and multimedia that contain it. If you have typed the name of a small village, you see it in the Atlas without clicking again. If Encarta does not find anything, it gives you alternative spellings and you find what you were looking for. To go "jumping" from article to article is very easy and quick, because you have a lot of links and the "Related Articles" section. If you need to copy text or pictures, the integration with Microsoft WORD is perfect. If you don't understand a word, you can double-click it and the dictionary appears in a window.
Navigating with Britannica is different. You get crazy. I will only give an example: if you do not know the exact and correct spelling of a name or word, it does not help you with alternative or similar spellings. The dictionary does not permit double-clicking of words in the text of articles for their definitions. Once an article is displayed you cannot search for a word within the article. This is extremely annoying: you have to perform this task yourself. One "pro" for Britannica: they say it works with Macintosh computers.
This is my piece of advice: If you can afford it, buy both. If not... read again this review.

If you are a serious user of reference books and you intend to buy multimedia encyclopedia because of its text content and not multimedia features such as videos and animations, you might be interested in this brief comparison between Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopaedia Britannica (in both cases I've been trying 2002 Standard Edition).

Some of the Encarta's pluses
Characters display
Encarta displays practically all foreign characters correct (e.g. Slovenian and Czech c with a circumflex, other Central European characters, Portuguese a and Spanish n with a tilde, French e with a grave accent, etc.) while Britannica doesn't. Two concrete examples: in Britannica a Croatian writer Senoa (S with a circumflex) is listed in the very beginning of the A-Z list, and a great Slovenian poet Preseren (again s with a circumflex) is almost imposible to find though he's listed in the Britannica A-Z. A fact that Encarta doesn't list those two men of letters at all is another story (see One big Encarta's minus at the end of this review).

Interface
Encarta has much more user friendly interface than newer versions of Britannica. In Britannica it's obviously designed for the extinct 14" monitors. Find tool in Britannica has its own window. Therefore you have to make more clicks to choose an article and read it than in the case of Encarta. Thousands of additional clicks mean a lot of extra time.

Multimedia content
It's also a (big) plus for Encarta, but for an adult user of encyclopedias multimedia isn't the most important feature.

One big Encarta's minus
Articles
Articles in Encarta are usually shorter and less precise than articles in Britannica, not to mention the overall number of articles (Britannica beats Encarta, especially its Standard Edition) And finally: there are more mistakes in Encarta than in Britannica.
One of the big blunders (in both encyclopedias!) is a false information that Slovenia, a Central European and Alpine country, lies on the Balkans, though the northern border of this peninsula is (in Encarta) correctly described as a line Upper Sava River - Rijeka. Slovenia lies north of the Croatian seaport Rijeka and doesn't belong to the Balkans neither geographically or politically!

My advice
Probably the best decision is to buy both Encarta and Britannica (of course not necessarily the same year; in my opinion Britannica is the one who should wait until its interface is improved - or even reversed to its '98 version). It may be very useful to have two different sources of information - not only for researchers and students.
If you don't mind about multimedia features and if you'll use multimedia encyclopedia as an authoritative source of facts and information only, you'll probably prefer Britannica. But keep in mind that even in Britannica there are some small and big mistakes (and that its interface and character display aren't as user friendly as in Encarta).

PS
I actually gave Encarta 3-4 stars for its interface and 1-2 stars for its contents.

I have had it for 6 months, used it a lot, and feel that I haven't gotten through 5% of what it has to offer. The articles are evidently not - and couldn't be - the last word in comprehensiveness, but there are links for further reference etc. Beautiful software, great reference, fun, informative, resourceful. I wished I had had it as a teenager. Totally happy with it.

I guess better late than never, right? Well this was cool back in the day, but most of the content is still relevant. I mean I've seen people have encyclopedias from the 60's on the shelves.

This product is simply amazing. From the 3D Tours, to an incredible Atlas, to the dictionary and foreign language translator, you can't beat it!

I have been a Microsoft Encarta users for years now. Always buying the upadtes every year. For some strange reason Encarta locks after I look up 1 or more pieces of information.

I love the program but I have to restart it every minute or so. Very annoying!

Other friends of mine complain about it being very slow on their system.

Maybe I have an isolated problem on my machine. I hve the latest software updates and a very new Sony laptop. I canīt figure out what is wrong.

I say buy it and try it yourslef on your machine. If it locks up take it back and consider another company. Donīt go through years of hoping Microsft will getting around to getting rid of the bugs in it.