Microsoft Encarta Premium Suite 2003

A wealth of knowledge within reach of your wallet as well as your fingertips.

Price: £69.99

Manufacturer: Microsoft

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Verdict

Pros:

Beautiful presentation; fantastic depth of content.
Cons: 3D tours still don't perform as we would hope.
Overall: Encarta is one of those rare products that can be described as a joy to use. Visually stimulating, well written and on the whole reliable, it remains our first choice electronic reference work.

Nik Rawlinson, Personal Computer World 04 Nov 2002

If you could make the distinction between an encyclopaedia and a reference work, Encarta would fall into the latter category, having taken the whole encyclopaedia genre way beyond that for which it was originally designed.

Far more than a collection of static text and pictures, it would not be an exaggeration to describe this as a learning experience, whatever your age and for whatever reason you bought it.

You can look at Encarta as an educational newspaper, if you like. Investigate a country or a city and there's a fair chance it will give you an up-to-the minute weather report among the data returned, or tune you into a local radio station to give you a flavour of local culture.

Encarta's home page even tailors itself to reflect current events. Launching the app on 29 August, for example, reminded us that it is five years since Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car crash.

It also links you to her entry in the encyclopaedia (middle name Frances, born in a rented house, worked in a kindergarten).

As with previous versions, this release is both international and simultaneously British, with coverage of domestic events given equal prominence to global issues.

It's just as easy to look up the early finances of London radio station LBC or the political make-up of Chelmsford in Essex as it is to uncover the history of the United Nations.

This is thanks to the fact that 40 of the 200 editors working on the Encarta project are UK-based, and in part to the strength of the index which, as ever, is excellent.

A search tool provides the most direct route to the information you need, but it's far more fun to explore using the interactive timeline, atlas or multimedia centre. Navigating the 100,000 entries, 22,500 photos and 3,240 videos and sound files in this way can be an engaging and addictive process.

The extensive use of material from The Times adds significantly to the value of this product, putting in one place countless pages that would otherwise require considerable patience to uncover.

Where else could you read Hitler's obituary (2 May 1945) or the disappointment of reviewers on the first night of independent TV in the UK ("everyone on their best behaviour and below their usual form") without leaving your desk?

We did find one inaccuracy while testing. It claims that novelist Jill Paton Walsh married Edmund Paton Walsh in 1961. He was, in fact, her son.

We were disappointed by the 3D tours, too. In our Encarta 2002 review we questioned the value of these, and we're not inclined to change our opinion this time around.

While they are innovative, they are poorly implemented, and we frequently found ourselves reverting to more conventional text-based research tools each time we tried to use one.

Encarta is used in 86 per cent of British secondary schools so it's no surprise that Microsoft has kept a keen eye on the education market.

The bundled dictionary also now translates English to and from Spanish, French, Italian and German, and for the sight-impaired a rather unnatural voice can read articles aloud as though they are announcements at a railway station.

In the years it has been on the shelves, Encarta has reinvented itself more times than Madonna and, as such, looks as fresh as ever. What's more, at £70 it represents extraordinary value for money, particularly when you consider that in print form Encarta would fill up to 60 volumes.

Two most significant enhancements over the last few years have been the introduction of a DVD edition, putting an end to the endless disc-swapping, and the integration of online updates, which are free for a year with every release.

On this evidence, Microsoft's claim that this is "the encyclopaedia that changes with the times" rings true.

Price: £69.99 (£59.57 ex VAT)

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