Product Reviews

Encarta 2007 has had a bit of makeover. It has clearly been redesigned to fit in with the look and feel of Microsoft's forthcoming operating system, Windows Vista. Microsoft has also wisely ditched the "subject carousel" that used to appear on the home screen, replacing it with a simple list of subject categories. The result is a much cleaner and more easily navigable encyclopaedia.

Encarta covers all the subject areas you'd expect it to: arts and literature; geography; history; science and technology and so on. As well as a wide selection of articles, the program makes good use of videos, animations

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and photos to bring its material to life. As ever, all these different elements are well integrated and the whole package feels a lot like using a particularly slick multimedia website.

New look aside, however, we couldn't find much new about this version of Encarta. Thanks to the web update function, the content is certainly up-to-date, but there aren't any really new features. This isn't catastrophic though, the old version of Encarta already had everything you could want from an encyclopaedia with more than enough articles, videos, maps, timelines, charts, statistics and so on.

Compared to Britannica, however, Encarta has fewer articles - and the articles it does have tend not to be as comprehensive as those of its competitor. In previous years we preferred Encarta to Britannica, despite Britannica's greater comprehensiveness. This was because Britannica was clunky and, compared to Encarta, poorly adapted for use on the PC. This year, though it's still less polished than Encarta, Britannica's presentation has improved greatly. For this reason, for the first time ever, it's Britannica rather than Encarta that gets our Best Buy award and our recommendation.