The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition : Print and CD-ROM Edition (Hardcover)

Overwriting DLL files is a common event when one installs a new Windows program. The new program contains the latest Windows DLLs and in fact you want these new DLL files on your machine so it's good to agree to the overwriting.

The DLLs installed with our CD are not a replacement for Microsoft DLLs. They are new DLLs from Microsoft with their changes and fixes. I would not recommend keeping all Windows 95 DLLs from 1995; after all we've gotten quite a few patches and service packs since then.

If you still want to keep your old files, you can do that and most likely you would not have any problems. As we see Paulibus did keep his old DLLs and it did not affect the installation.

On the other issue, a user can accept the changes to the global template of Word made by the installation of the CD and the message will not ask you about this particular instance of change again.

This question is asked because AHD4 is integrated with a number of Microsoft Office programs. For example, if you want to look up a word or phrase in the MS Word document you are reading, you can select the phrase and click on the right mouse button. One of the options in the menu would be the American Heritage Dictionary. If you click on this item, the dictionary would come up with the definition you requested.

If you do not like/need this feature, you can remove integration with MS Word by removing the file AHD4Lookup.dot from the Word Startup directory and remove integration with MS Excel by removing the file AHD4Lookup.xla from the Excel XLStart directory.

A few other questions have been raised by another user.

Note that the Learning Company's AHD3 CD without a CD in the drive does not show images or play sound, which are the big users of space.

When running from the hard drive, the AHD4 CD does take less than 1 sec. to get the definition on any of the machines on which we have it installed (PII-450; AMD K2-300; PII-500).

Page Up/Down does work in the word list. Just tab to the list and you can use whatever keyboard controls you want.

It was never intended to use word list scrolling to look for a word in the lengthy list of words provided. Just type the first letter and you are there.

We should add that the Help information is

Email: eref@hmco.com

Phone number: 617-351-3836 9:00pm - 5:00pm, Monday - Friday, Eastern Standard Time

Mailing Address: Houghton Mifflin Company 222 Berkeley Street Boston, MA 02116-3764

Attention: Electronic Reference Publishing, 8th FL

Also in Help you can find out how to install the dictionary application on your hard drive.

Finally this is a PC product only. We are working on a way to provide the dictionary to Mac users.

Unfortunately, the list of negatives is longer. For one, the AHD4 interface is rather awkward and unconventional. For instance, the AHD logo gratuitously occupies approximately 30 percent of the AHD4 interface. And you cannot minimize, resize, or otherwise eliminate the logo. Second, AHD4 offers a sparse feature set. Unlike previous versions of the AHD software, AHD4 sadly eliminates the thesaurus feature. The search functions of AHD4 are limited as well. Yes, it will help you to locate words that you aren't certain how to spell, and it does allow wild card searches for individual words. But those are largely the extent of its search functions: no logical search functions are offered. There is a search option for images and searches for various kinds of usage notes, but this involves clicking on a menu item to bring up a list of all the dictionary entries containing the searched for item type and scrolling to find the entry you want. I also found it particularly inconvenient that I could not search AHD4's database of definitions: The lack of this kind of search function in a computer dictionary seems to me egregious. I also found it irksome that I could not double-click or right-click a word within a definition to look it up. Instead, you have copy it and paste it into AHD4's search box. AHD4 does allow you to right-click a word within Microsoft Word to obtain its definition, which is useful, but on the down side this feature doesn't work in other word processing programs. There is also no way to bookmark particular words. A final complaint is that AHD4's install routine does not offer the option for a full install. You can do a full install (if you search the help file to learn how to do so after you've already installed AHD4), but it's not user-friendly for the novice computer user.

Overall, if you are concerned solely with content, AHD4 is exceptional. However, for me the measure of a software dictionary's excellence is how it enables you to access that content. In terms of its functionality as a software dictionary, I found AHD4 unfortunately only mediocre.