Customer Reviews

Microsoft Encarta Standard 2003 [OLD VERSION]

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

 

 

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.

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'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.

This software stopped my Encarta Reference Suite 2001 from working and it automatically installs Internet Explorer ver. 6 which made it impossible for me to download images on AOL. I would prefer software that doesn't affect other software that is already installed on the computer.

This software stopped my Encarta Reference Suite 2001 from working and it automatically installs Internet Explorer ver. 6 which made it impossible for me to download images on AOL. I would prefer software that doesn't affect other software that is already installed on the computer.