Microsoft® Encarta® 2005 Premium
By Jim Shireman –
February 20, 2005
On February 3rd, 2005 I made a presentation of Microsoft® Encarta® Premium to the SouthSide Computer Club in Greenwood, Indiana.
We reminisced about when we all owned Encyclopedias, how expensive they were ($100’s of dollars), how heavy they were, and how quickly they became out of date particularly in Science, Medicine, Political/Governments, and Maps. Going digital has significantly increased the usability and quality of doing research for school and for everyday use. Several members indicated they are using older versions of Encarta and have used other products from such companies as Grolier.
Our members felt the new MS Encarta 2005 GUI interface with drop down menus and icons was excellent and made finding what they would need very easy. We discussed further the need to update information and everyone felt this was very difficult in the past with Encarta as well as other products. However, during the demonstrations they saw how easy was to do and that they could do it anytime. They felt it gave them the ability to keep up to date with current events as they unfolded. Something we could not do with printed Encyclopedias.
The search capability for anything was great and with showing the results to the left in a usable order made getting to what you wanted very easy to do. One member indicated that in a prior version of Encarta they searched for Trail of Tears. That search yielded dismal results and that Grolier did much better. However, with this new 2005 version of Encarta many results came up including suggested links on the internet for more information. They were very impressed.
Being a computer club we searched for ‘Computers which also yielded a significant number of results including web links. We spent a lot of time going by date and reviewing what happened those years even realizing that Windows® 3.1 was introduced in 1990…only 15 years ago.
The articles and quotations were Ok but the group felt the results on the left were not easy to use particularly for Quotations. It was difficult to find quotes by individuals. The results window on the left was very crowded and it was not easy to browse through it. This needs to be made easier to use.
The group liked the kids games and felt these would be very easy to use for the age group it was designed for. They also liked the Dictionary with Parental Controls.
My wife is a math teacher and she liked the online student Math Help. She felt it would give students additional help in developing their math skills. She would have liked to see this be in the Encarta Software though so students wouldn’t have to be online to use it.
The ability to turn on speech to have it read articles was very interesting, a little hokey, but, not bad. We are sure that as speech recognition moves along it won’t sound so jerkey and electronic.
We would have liked to see more integration with other MS products such as MS Word®. After reaching information we searched for it might have been nice to just click on a Word icon and have the entire article move there without cutting and pasting. We feel that students would find this feature very useful.
We also reviewed Videos and Photos which for students would be very useful in learning more about a subjects and using them in reports. There were many other features we did not get to review during out time but, may do that in a later meeting.
Overall our group felt the enhancements to Encarta 2005 were significant and made it a very good product. We could not think of any other products out there on the market which would come close to this product. We gave a way two copies of the software at our meeting and others indicated they would go out and purchase it.