Britannica Power Pack 98 review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 1 Jan 1999

Price when reviewed: (£149)

Reviewed By: - Frank Kriwaczek

Our Rating 6 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Britannica has pulled off the impossible.

Eighteen months ago, it seemed the archetypal corporate dinosaur. However, after a change of ownership and dramatic re-engineering, it's released a CD-ROM encyclopedia that's overtaken Encarta and been a software number one for months.

Britannica CD comes on two disks and uses Internet Explorer as its interface. Many articles include thumbnails and diagrams; there are audio and video clips, and image-rich 'spotlight' explorations of subjects.

As well as browsing a list of 72,000 articles, you can also search with the excellent index or with keywords. In addition, the Spectrum feature lets you navigate 'top-down' until you've found the topic you're after - at which point it'll usually offer a list of articles. All these facilities operate surprisingly quickly. Some sections, however, can be demanding, so younger children will need help interpreting them.

Britannica CD includes an attractive timeline feature, a fine dictionary, good maps and excellent tools for producing tables and charts.

The Britannica Power Pack comprises the 98 version of the Multimedia edition (hardly different in content from the latest one), the excellent Rand McNally New Millennium World Atlas (similar to the Encarta World Atlas, but including far more historical material), and the Oxford Compendium (including the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the Oxford Thesaurus and two dictionaries of quotations).

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