Encarta 2004 Premium Suite integrates an encyclopaedia, World atlas, dictionary and thesaurus into one seamless package. It is available in either CD or DVD format and runs on all recent versions of Windows.

Fig.1: Encarta opens with the Visual Browser, inviting you to click your way in to its depths. It's web-based interface means that anyone can use it.

Multimedia presentation means that along with the facts and figures, you also get sounds, animations and movies. Naturally, this is one of the biggest selling points of what is now the world’s most popular multimedia encyclopaedia. Included in the 2004 edition are 130,000 articles, 25,000+ photos and illustrations, 3000 sound and music clips, 1.8 million atlas locations and over 260 videos and animations.

Equally important to content is the ability to be able to pinpoint, extract and organise the material of interest. This is exceptionally easy in Encarta 2004 with the aid of a web-based interface and excellent search facilities. If you’ve used a web browser before, you’ll be able to drive Encarta "out of the box".

Basic features

Encarta uses a concept called "centres" to provide casual access to its vast store of information. Each centre is accessible via a drop-down menu on the main toolbar. Available centres include articles, maps, multimedia content, statistics, geographical tours, historical timelines, games and online material.

For more than just casual browsing, you can use Encarta’s powerful search facilities to quickly find what you want. A search from the main toolbar draws elements from the encyclopaedia, atlas, dictionary, thesaurus and the Internet and arranges the results in a familiar "web" style page layout. For example, a search for "Albert Einstein" returns a main article on the man, headed with a clickable contents list. A series of related resources appears in the right margin, including links to additional articles, quotations, multimedia content, a sidebar from the Times (in this case, Einstein’s obituary) and links to recommended Internet sites.

As you identify content that is pertinent to your work, you can add it to your Favourites list for instant access later. Even better, you can gather text and media "on the fly" using the Researcher tool. This excellent tool also makes it easy to add statistics, charts, tables, notes and more to your reports. Of course, you can also export content to other applications if so desired.