Trouble-free setup
To install Encarta, simply follow the directions. It's nearly impossible to get lost. Microsoft gives you two installation options: standard, in which you install only the application and must swap CDs while using the product, or the new "Copy to hard disk" option, where you put the Encyclopedia's entire contents (more than 2.2GB of data) onto your hard disk. We tried it both ways and found that although the new install feature is supposed to save time, our 128MB, 1GHz Pentium 4 took just as long to access the data that way as when we swapped CDs.
After installation and restart, the program displays an Encarta Today screen that presents a list of out-of-date articles, offers available updates, and provides access to the program's update feature and online content. Younger children might need some practice navigating the menu bars, which often bury some features, and Encarta packs little in the way of tutorials. For the rest of you, however, the interface is easy to work with, understated, and recognizable to Windows and Encarta users alike.
Full o' facts
As in editions past, Encarta comes jammed with countless articles, interactive timelines and maps, archives of primary source material, speeches and commentaries, images, video, and sounds. If you need more info than an Encarta article provides, supplement your research by clicking one of the relevant Web links, which escort you to original Microsoft content or selected URLs. Microsoft's editors screen each link to make sure they contain relevant content--which they do. However, we think much information on many of the related links is rudimentary. For example, an Encarta page about museums contains links to an art museum--nothing revolutionary there and probably something you could find on your own.
Back to basics
Encarta contains all the standard reference fare to help students get a head start on a school project or nail down the basics of a timeline or event before plunging into deeper material. The Reference Library includes the standard collection, with a dictionary and a thesaurus, so students can decipher difficult words in articles or quickly translate words and simple phrases to Spanish and French. You'll also find the Interactive World Atlas, which boasts 22 map types and 1.8 million place names--it's handy if you need to explain, for example, the current conflict in Afghanistan. However, frustratingly, some maps contain more detail than others (for instance, the topography maps let you drill down to the country level, but religious breakdown maps usually go down to only the continental or regional level).
If you're interested in African or African-American history, Encarta Africana provides details about African culture and history that you won't find in other parts of the encyclopedia. In particular, the Encarta Africana provides stunning multimedia experiences, such as a collection of slave narratives and a music timeline. On the whole, every Encarta reference tool offers fun multimedia enhancements, such as photos and sounds, to complement article content. What's more, Encarta ships in a DVD version, which contains even more multimedia, video, audio, and Virtual Flights: flyover tours of various locations.
In spite of the abundance of features and information, Encarta still performs about as well as its competition, Grolier and Encyclopedia Britannica; each tool provides roughly the same type and number of articles. But Encarta earns its slightly higher price tag ($60, vs. $50 for the 2001 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia) with seamless Web integration, extra content such as the Africana module, and the fact that is it nearly standard issue in American schools. (Institutions can purchase multiple user licenses and are eligible for volume pricing, lesson plans, and other educational programs.)
