Product Reviews

As you'd expect, Britannica is absolutely crammed with articles, 75,000 of them to be precise - that's 33,000 more than Encarta. The quality of the articles is excellent too - the ones we looked at were long, detailed and well-referenced. Students and older school pupils will find many of the articles comprehensive enough to serve as primary sources for their essays. We particularly liked the Britannica Classics feature - a library of entries from past editions, each written by a famous authority in their field. These range from an entry about guerrilla warfare written by Lawrence of

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Arabia to a gloriously egotistical article on conjuring written by Houdini - he only mentions one conjurer, himself.

In previous editions, Britannica suffered from a cluttered and inelegant interface, but although not as well constructed as Encarta, the 2007 edition goes a long way to solving this problem. The main screen consists simply of a Toolbar, a search function and a list of resources. The search function works well, allowing you to find the resources for any given topic in a matter of seconds. If you'd prefer to browse the impressive collection of articles, videos, maps and other materials, you can use the resource list on the main screen instead. Oddly though, any article you open remains open even when you navigate away from it to a different resource.

Like Encarta, Britannica makes good use of multimedia material and has plenty of links to relevant websites. These aren't integrated as neatly into the main body of an entry, but they're there, and that's the important thing.

Britannica still isn't as polished as its rival - but it's far more easily navigable and smooth running than in previous editions and it offers a wealth of material.