Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2008 (www.microsoft.com, $49.99)helps students find and use information from Encarta Premium 2008 encyclopedia and from links to trusted Web sites. The program also offers learning activities, tutorials, research options, and much more, all geared to helping students with their studies. The advantage of this program is that the information is all in one place, and students don’t have to sort through information they find (especially from the Internet) that may or may not be credible.

Encarta Premium 2008 by itself offers plenty of information: more than 60,000 articles, 25,000 photos and illustrations, 800 videos and interactive content, 3,000 sound and music clips and reference tools such as a dynamic atlas, dictionary, thesaurus and language translation dictionaries. Also included is Microsoft Math, which includes a graphing calculator, equation solver, equation library and more. If these resources don’t have what students need, there are links to more than 25,000 Web sites, pre-selected by Encarta editors for relevant and age-appropriate material.

New to Microsoft Student is Learning Essentials 2.0, which includes templates, tutorials and toolbars for use with MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The tutorials were developed with the expertise of the Great Source division of Houghton Mifflin, Pearson Prentice Hall and SchoolKiT; they offer options such as a research writing tutorial that walks students through three types of research reports and analyses of problems in math, physics, chemistry and more. Templates offer help in all the standard types of reports and presentations students are likely to have for homework, and Toolbars makes it all easier to use.

We looked at a few of the many options available and found help for every type of project we could imagine. If you have an compare-contrast essay due, for example, just select Papers and Reports from the list of options on the home screen, then Essays, and then the type of essay. You can look at Tutorials on several aspects of writing or just go directly to the Template, where you find a complete format for writing your essay, including title, your name and class and more. A callout box puts additional help a click away, making it easy to use citations, create a bibliography and more. No matter what type of writing you have to do, there’s plenty of help here.

Another type of help could be for a student who needs to find information on the American revolution, for example. Searching for this term brings you to a listing of the articles related to the topic (specific battles, documents related to the revolution and the like) Web links, photos and more. You still have to do the research and analysis, but this is as easy as it gets.

The same type of information is available for creating presentations, charts and graphs, finding college and career information and even "games and fun stuff" for diversion.

We also looked at just finding information by using the Explore by Subject option. If you just want information on Alaska, for example, you’ll find a listing of the history, resources, economy and more and also a choice of sources to display facts and figures about the state and links to additional information. Or type "Madrid, Spain," and you can go directly to a map showing its location, or you can click on the other options listed to find articles, photos, web links, and the like relating to Madrid.

You can also search just for photos, videos and other multimedia options for topics, places or events. Whether you want to explore ideas, look for a specific topic or subject, there’s enough information here to help you learn or write about whatever you want.

The program also includes detailed book summaries for almost 1,000 classic works, complete with information about the author, themes and characters in the book; these summaries are listed by author and are filled with extensive information that can help you understand the book content or provide information and ideas for writing about the book or author.

Math Tools includes help in basic math, pre-algebra, algebra (including logarithms and exponents) and trigonometry. The Equation Solver lets you enter a problem and see step-by-step help on how to solve it. There’s also free online access to Hotmath.

Foreign Language Help has a full-featured dictionary for translating and conjugating verbs in Spanish, French, Italian and German and tools for completing assignments in Spanish, German and French. Verb conjugations are a snap—just enter the verb, select the language, and a complete listing of the conjugations appears. It’s equally easy to find translations.

Along with all this help for students, Encarta 2008 is filled with information that anyone can use and that makes a multimedia encyclopedia so appealing: video and audio recordings to let you "see" an event or hear a person speak or perform, animations to help you understand an object, panoramic views to give you a feeling of "being there," 2D and 3D diagrams, and the like.

Encarta 2008 also includes Encarta for Kids, an encyclopedia for children ages 7 – 12, which is filled with colorful and lively information for the younger set. MS Student with Encarta Premium 2008 has enough information and help for students, their parents, and the younger set too. It’s a family resource and reference that the entire family can use.

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