Microsoft Encarta Premium Suite 2003

By JAMES ANTHONY

Microsoft’s Encarta Microsoft Encarta Premium Suite 2003 is a boxful of knowledge, facts and figures, no doubt about that.

Not only do you get the latest of the award-winning encyclopaedia, but also the Interactive World Atlas, World English Dictionary, thesaurus, Researcher tool, an international Curriculum Guide and study resources.

On biographies of famous people you get wealth of information, together with an image and a sound grab - a quote or maxim - and a multimedia file.

For Napoleon Bonaparte there was a huge listing broken in up into key parts of his rise and fall. In a related-information queue on the left of the screen there are links to newspaper reports about his rule and to other pages with his name in their texts.

Ned Kelly, Australian bushranger, folk hero and movie topic, gets a good Guernsey with multimedia links and a contemporary report from the Sydney Morning Herald on his execution.

Countries are covered in various sub-chapters that include Land and resources, Population, Economy, Government and History. Within these pages you can find out about currencies, tourism, political parties, the law, defence, social issues and a host of other matters. You can also access charts, maps and facts and figures.

There is a good depth of information that will make school projects an absolute breeze to research.

And even nations like Iraq, which could expect to feel a certain coldness from a US publication, seem to get given a pretty fair and objective treatment.

In Saddam Hussein’s page, for example, he is described as being an “authoritarian president” and the comment on Iraq’s recent status says: “Although links between Iraq and the perpetrators of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States remain highly speculative, the country was named as one member of an "axis of evil"-countries whose actions are seen as a threat to the United States and its allies-in the State of the Union address by President George W. Bush in January 2002.”

The World Atlas is excellent with first-class details on the countries of the world. There are maps and details of the country, images and web links. The maps get down to main street level and the graphics are nicely coloured and with very readable fonts.

Multimedia maps show images of the countries and can be targeted towards people, places, animals, symbols, landscapes, agriculture and industry, national anthems and flags.

The World English Dictionary obviously contains all you need to know about English words but also includes German, French, Spanish, Italian translation capabilities.

You can register, a fairly painless online process, to get monthly updates of information from the Encarta site. In a fast-moving world this facility is excellent for having the very latest data available on your desktop and a boon for students, teachers and those who just love finding out new things.

You get update highlights - a terrific feature that makes worthwhile reading - and each month’s new information takes up about 2MB of disk space.

For more info on the new Encarta suite, go to the official website.