Product Description

Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007, the #1 best-selling encyclopedia brand, provides more up-to-date content and more engaging multimedia than ever before. Whether you’re searching online or offline, it’s the trusted way for everyone in the family to easily find relevant and reliable information on just about any subject.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3016 in Software
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: FB7-00442
• Released on: 2006-07-10
• Platform: Windows XP
• Format: DVD-ROM
• Dimensions: 2.00 pounds

Features

• More multimedia resources than ever, including more than 300 videos, 3000 sound clips, 26,000 photos, and illustrations from trusted sources
• Geopolitical, climatic, and topographical maps of the world, with links to related information
• See historic events and places with 2-and 3-D virtual tours
• Input your own problems into the new Equation Solver and get a quick answer and step-by-step help on how to solve it
• Thousands of media-rich, up-to-date articles by authors who are experts in their field

Amazon.com
Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007 provides up-to-date content and engaging multimedia. Whether you’re searching online or offline, it’s the trusted way for everyone in the family to easily find relevant and reliable information on just about any subject. Encarta Premium 2007 features a new look and feel that makes it easy to use. You'll be able to get started right away exploring scholarly knowledge from one of the world’s most trusted encyclopedias.

Many Encarta articles have links to photos, video, articles on related topics, and links to approved content on the Web. View larger.

Encarta maps let you zoom in and out to see more or less detail, and you can click anywhere on the map to find instant links to related information. View larger.

Encarta Kids provides children ages 7-12 a safer place to explore all kinds of topics. View larger.

The Web Companion results include trusted information from both Encarta Premium 2007 and the Web. View larger.

Thousands of media-rich, up-to-date articles you can trust
When searching offline, you can access more than 64,000 articles on just about any topic—with links to related information. The authors of the detailed articles in Encarta Premium 2007 are experts in their field. And every time you go online, your Encarta Premium 2007 content is updated with automatic downloads that add new information directly into existing articles. Many Encarta articles are enhanced with rich multimedia content. Encarta Premium 2007 contains more multimedia resources than ever, including more than 300 videos, 3000 sound clips, 26,000 photos, and illustrations from trusted sources.

Want to watch wildlife? Explore Mars? Travel the globe from the comfort of your home? Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007 has the visual tools to help. See historic events and places with 2-and 3-D virtual tours. Get a new perspective on the past with the unique Dynamic Timeline, which illustrates key events from geologic time to the present day. Feel the excitement of swimming with the sharks and more. Enjoy the 32 captivating videos from the Discovery Channel which let you view a range of topics in detail. Some Encarta articles also include virtual tours: From our solar system to the ruins of Pompeii, special images guide you through the physical layout of the subjects that interest you.

Search more efficiently using Web Companion
Information is readily accessible thanks to the Encarta Search Bar. Results include trusted information from both Encarta Premium 2007 and the Web. Many Internet searches bring up links that aren’t relevant to the research subject. Using Web Companion to conduct searches, students instantly see links to related Encarta content.

Geopolitical, climatic, and topographical maps of the world
Zoom in and out to see more or less detail. Click anywhere on the map and find instant links to related information.

New equation solver
Stuck on a math problem? Input your own problems into the equation solver and get a quick answer and step-by-step help on how to solve it.

A wide range of trusted Encarta reference tools
Encarta Premium 2007 includes a dictionary, a thesaurus, and translation dictionaries.

Editorially approved content
Kids can use Web Links to over 29,000 Web sites, pre-selected by Encarta editors for relevant and age-appropriate research material.

Encarta Kids
This special area is for younger learners, ages 7 to 12. Packed with age-appropriate articles and lively multimedia, Encarta Kids provides your children with a safer place to explore all kinds of topics. Learning will become a lifetime activity. This colorful, easy to navigate environment has plenty of maps, photos, and interactive quizzes to engage your children's imaginations. With age-appropriate articles, maps, and photos, it’s a great place for children to explore their universe.

Customer Reviews

A universe of knowledge on your screen
While Microsoft Encarta Premium 2006 marked Microsoft's commitment to the Web - Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007 marks its commitments to its own technology. The new Encarta relies on Microsoft's powerful, flexible, scalable, and adaptable .Net Framework 2.0. There a price to pay, of course: the time it takes to install the product is much longer and the user is henceforth prompted to constantly download security updates from Microsoft. It is also recommended to turn off your firewall and anti-virus products during installation.

More than ever, the Encarta is a breathtaking resource. With 68,000 articles (compared to 64,000 last year), it is much expanded (though about 1000 photos and illustrations and 500 music and sound clips were removed from this edition). Certain, resource-hogging features disappeared from last year (for example: the Read Aloud and Live News functions).

The Encarta caters effectively (and, at $30-50, affordably) to the educational needs of everyone in the family, from children as young as 7 or 8 years old to adults who seek concise answers to their queries. It is fun-filled, interactive, and colorful. Kids have their own encyclopedia-within-encyclopedia, dubbed Encarta Kids with age-appropriate, appetizingly presented content and games to boot!

The 2007 Encarta's User Interface is far less cluttered than in previous editions. Content is arranged by topics and then by relevancy and medium. Add to this the Encarta's Visual Browser and you get only relevant data in response to your queries. The Encarta Search Bar, which was integrated into the product two years ago, and is resident in the Task Pane even when Encarta is closed, enables users to search any part of the Encarta application (encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, etc).

The Encarta's newish Web Companion obtains search results from all the major search engines without launching any additional applications (like a browser). Content from both the Encarta and the Web is presented side by side. This augmentation explicitly adopts the Internet and incorporates it as an important source of reference.

I am not sure how Microsoft solved the weighty and interesting issues of intellectual property that the Web Companion raises, though. Copyright-holders of Web content may feel that they have the right to be compensated by Microsoft for the use it makes of their wares in its commercial products.

Encarta would do well to also integrate with new desktop search tools from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. Users should be able to seamlessly access content from all over - their desktop, their encyclopedias, and the Web - using a single, intuitive interface.

The Encarta Premium includes a dictionary, thesaurus, chart maker, searchable index of quotations, games, Discovery Channel videos, 25,000 photos and illustrations, 2500 sound and audio clips, hundreds of maps and tables (with a staggering 1.8 million map locations), and 300 videos and animations. It incorporates numerous third-party texts and visuals (including hundreds of newspaper articles and a plethora of Scientific American features).

The Encarta is augmented by weekly or bi-weekly updates and the feature-rich online MSN Encarta Premium with its Homework Help offerings. Unfortunately, the Encarta still conditions some of its functions - notably its research tools and updates - on registration with its Plus Club. Moreover, last year Encarta released only 26 updates, compared to its annual average of 50-60.

The Encarta is the most comprehensive, PC-orientated reference experience there is. No wonder it has an all-pervasive hold on and ubiquitous penetration of the child-to-young adult markets. Particularly enchanting is the aforementioned Encarta Kids interface - an area replete with interactive quizzes, pictures, large icons, hundreds of articles, and links to the full version of the Encarta. A veritable and colorful sandbox. Those kids are going to get addicted to the Encarta, that's for sure!

Encarta actively encourages fun-filled browsing. It is a riot of colors, sidebars, videos, audio clips, photos, embedded links, literature, Web resources, and quizzes. It is a product of the age of mass communication, a desktop extension of television and the Internet.

Inevitably, in such a mammoth undertaking, not everything is peachy. A few gripes:

As I said, installation is not as easy as before. The Encarta 2007 makes use of Microsoft's .Net technology. As most home computers lack it, the installer insists on adding it to the anyhow bloated Windows Operating System. There is worse to come: the .Net version installed by Encarta 2007 is plagued with security holes and vulnerabilities. Users have to download service packs and patches from Windows Update if they do not wish to run the risk of having their computers compromised by hackers.

Fully installed on the hard disk, the Encarta Premium 2007 gobbles up less than its predecessors but still a whopping 3 Gb. That's a lot - even in an age of ever cheaper storage. Most homesteads still sport PCs with 20-40 Gb hard disks. This makes the Encarta less suitable for installation on older PCs and on many laptops.

The Encarta DVD 3-D tours have improved but they still hog computer resources and are essentially non-interactive. Is it worth the investment and the risk to the stability and performance of the user's computer?

The Encarta tries to cater to the needs of challenged users, such as the visually-impaired - but it is far from doing a good or full job of it.

The dictionary has been greatly improved in this edition. Actually, the Encarta 2007 comes equipped with five foreign language dictionaries and verb conjugating applications. Still, the atlas, English language dictionary, and thesaurus incorporated in the Encarta are somewhat outdated. Why not use a more current - and dynamically updated - offering? What about dictionaries for specialty terms (medical or computer glossaries, for instance)? The Encarta's New English Dictionary dropped a glossary of computer terms it used to include back in 2001. All's the pity.

But that's it. Encarta is a must-buy (especially if you have children). The Encarta is the best value for money around and significantly enhances you access to knowledge and wisdom accumulated over centuries all over the world. The amount and quality of content squeezed into a $50 package (before rebate) defies belief. I am a 45 years old adult but when I received my Encarta Premium 2007, I was once more a child in a land of wonders. How much is such an experience worth to you? Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited".

Much improved
Kudos Microsoft. My last go around with Encare was with the 2004 version. At that time the program had a cluttered clusmey interface. The various modules weren't intuitive or intergrated and it was therefore, confusing and not partuiclarly user friendly. The new interface is quite simple but very powerful. It is well integrated with the web and therefore capable of constant updating. Perfect for the student and anyone who likes to research topics. If you have not tried Encarta in a while, check it out, there is much to like.

Don't buy it for the Atlas
If you think that getting the latest Encarta means getting the latest data and information... think again. I got this hoping to update my trusty Encarta 2001 installation (which I have just for the wonderful interactive virtual globe.. now somewhat surpassed by Google Earth but still great). Before uninstalling the 2007 version (Encarta won't allow more than one installation on a machine) I took some screenshots from the 2001 Atlas. Having installed the 2007 version, I did some comparisons... and found the map data is exactly the same! Yup, what you got in 2001, you get in 2007, and nothing more! OK, so there are some political updates in the big, obvious cases - Montenegro, for example, is shown correctly in Encarta 2007 as an autonomous region, a status it didn't have back in 2001. But these differences are few and far between (I could only find a couple). In the main, the *geographical* data is exactly the same as it was 6 years ago. For example, the map of the Aral Sea shown in Encarta 2007 IS EXACTLY THE SAME, pixel for pixel, as the Aral Sea shown in Encarta 2001 - despite the fact that it has shrunk more than 50% in size since then. Already in 2001 the map was a couple of years out of date, but now it's quite hopeless. Placename information is much the same, despite many changes in the real world. Just one example - Meigs Field Airport in Chicago ceased to exist in 2003 but despite yearly updates to the Encarta Encyclopedia, there it is, still cheerfully shown in the Encarta 2007 World Atlas (4 updates later). In fact, the entire Chicagoland area in the 2007 atlas is EXACTLY the same as in the 2001 edition, pixel for pixel, placename for placename.

So, apparently the Encarta Atlas 2007 people think we're too stupid, or igorant, to notice? Or is it just that it doesn't really matter to them to be accurate? Bring out yearly updates but make no changes to the core data? This isn't a very serious reference work, is it? OK, perhaps, for the occasional schoolboy homework assignment, but not for anything more important, is the message they are giving us. I used to think electronic editions of books would make for more rapid updates - but this demonstrates the reverse is true. The latest edition of the Times Atlas of the World is 2005 (hardcover only) and will give you much more up to date geographical information than the 2007 (or 2008) edition of the Encarta. And the previous edition of the Times Atlas was 2001, which just goes to show you - the printed version, in this case, is the more quickly updated version.

As a side note, a change that I find quite unwelcome in the 2007 edition (and in earlier ones after 2001, as far as I know) is that you don't get any choices on what to install. It's either everything, or nothing. With Encarta 2001, you got an extensive choice on what to install. I installed the Atlas only (and consider it alone well worth the price of the full product) and nothing else. Now, that is impossible. Apparently the Encarta people think we're too stupid to THINK about what we're doing when installing, so we are given no options, no choices?

Finally, the interface (for the Atlas) is far superior in the 2001 Encarta. In the later versions, including the 2007 version, it is all integrated with the other content, and it is clunky and annoying. If I am looking for a place on the map, I don't need 20 links to other irrelevant rubbish. Furthermore, you have to click TWICE to search for a placename in the 2007 version - once to get a general list of related content in the entire Encarta, and one reference to a map, which doesn't do a very thorough listing of the Atlas index, then another click to search the Atlas index by itself, which reveals a lot more hits to the Atlas index. In the 2001 version, you get JUST the Atlas hits for placenames right from the get-go, which is what I want.

I uninstalled the Encarta 2007 version and will be selling it on eBay, and have now gone back to the trusty 2001 Encarata.