Britannica also offers help for grade-school science fairs and interactive instruction in mathematics. Kindergartners reared on a TV diet might be turned off by Britannica's more sober interface, but brainy kids from ages 6 to 10 can explore everything from aardvarks and Absaroka to Zapata and Zuni.
By contrast, Microsoft Encarta splits its encyclopedia between two distinct tools that you open separately, with the peppy Encarta Kids targeting ages up to 12. Also helpful is the BrainStormer, which maps topics in spiderweb-like forms to display the subjects connected to your query.Įlementary users open the digital Britannica to a photograph of an "animal of the day" but also a lot of text. We like that you can add bookmarks and jot and save notes within encyclopedia entries. Keyboard shortcuts work, such as Ctrl-W (in Windows) to close a tab. As you look up subjects, their related articles, images, and videos stack up along the left, and Britannica arranges results within central tabs so that you can interrupt lookups, then revisit them later. Enter a query into the search field, and Britannica attempts to guess what you're typing. The 2007 Britannica also enables proxy support so that a corporate or school firewall won't interfere with operation, one thing that interfered with our testing in the last edition.Įach age-appropriate version of Britannica 2007 organizes data similarly. And unlike Microsoft Encarta, Britannica didn't ask to monitor our usage. Custom installation, on the other hand, lets you handpick elements to store on your hard drive. You can also choose the Typical installation, but that will make you insert the DVD when you want to watch videos or listen to music. Full installation took about 20 minutes in our tests on a Windows XP machine. Your computer needs a sound card, speakers, and QuickTime to use Britannica's multimedia features. Microsoft's 2007 editions of Encarta and Student, on the other hand, work with only Windows XP SP2. You'll need a computer running either Windows 2000 or XP or Mac OS 10.4, with 512MB of RAM and at least 2GB of free hard drive space to install Britannica 2007. We were relieved that the installation took half as long as it did last year.
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