Microsoft Encarta Standard 2003

Using your active Internet connection, Encarta adds up-to-the-minute articles and news as it happens while automatically revising existing content with its Update Encarta feature. As a result, you're always working with reliable and relevant reference material. Whether doing research or looking for general information, Encarta makes searches easy, plus it adds thousands of Web links, so you can take your research beyond the encyclopedia. Everyone in the family will enjoy interacting with the full range of multimedia options, including images, videos, animations, and audio, that make learning more enjoyable than ever before.

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.


Encarta, brand-new every year, again in 2003.   July 6, 2002
Billy Budd (Boston, MA USA)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful

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.