Product Reviews

Anyone upgrading from the 2005 to the 2006 edition of Microsoft Encarta Premium might notice a couple of things missing. One is £10 from the price; the other is the suite of 'homework help' tools designed to help students make best use of the encyclopedia for their schoolwork. Microsoft hasn't just ditched the tools, though - it has used them as the basis for yet another Encarta spin-off called Student 2006.

Aimed at students between 12 and 18, Student 2006 still includes a full copy of Encarta 2006 (albeit the Reference Library edition), but it presents it in a way tailored specifically for school studies. The traditional and children's Encarta interfaces are still there, but a new student-specific interface organises encyclopedia content into subject areas to suit the UK curriculum.

The list of subjects doesn't quite tally with that of the National Curriculum and some subjects are missing, most notably RE. Many of the resources for each subject are just direct links to Encarta articles, though, and a search toolbar makes finding an unlisted item straightforward enough.

Homework help is a fairly open remit, and Student 2006 tries to meet it by including features over and above those contained in Encarta itself. English students are particularly well served; there are just over a hundred literature guides for classic and modern novels, plus a dozen or so project starters that give tips on writing

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anything from an advertisement to a play.

The rest of the humanities get the full multimedia treatment, too, but the sciences come up short. Just over 20 pop science videos from the Discovery Channel are a token gesture for biology, chemistry and physics, but maths just gets a list of unexplained commonly used equations, and health and sports education barely gets a mention, with just a list of results for notable sporting events.

In addition to the Encarta-based components, Student 2006 also includes a set of learning essentials. The bulk of this consists of a comprehensive selection of templates for Microsoft Office programs. These are mostly excellent and include slick presentations, written reports and tables for a variety of subjects.

Some, however, are less useful. The scraps of cartoon-style clip-art for creating "fun and exciting diagrams" for biology, chemistry and physics are an affront to art, let alone science. Several useful click-through tutorials on using various Office features are provided, but the box's mention of "toolbars [to] help students create high-quality reports and presentations" is a bit misleading, since they're simply features already found in Office, and all Student 2006 does is simply draw attention to them.

A graphical calculator rounds off the package. If mathematicians have been poorly served so far, this goes a long way to make up for it. This can plot graphs in both two and three dimensions, solves simultaneous equations and does quite a bit more besides. Better still, tool tips explain what every function does when the mouse pointer is held over a button.

Despite the odd misgiving, Student 2006 is good value, although whether the extra features are worth the £20 premium over the standard Encarta 2006 Reference Library edition depends on whether or not you have Microsoft Office. If not, Office XP Standard will set you back another £80, which makes the free OpenOffice and online Wikipedia encyclopedia rather more attractive.