Great for College and Graduate Students- Graphing Calculator the best feature
Ok- I've been using this product for a couple of years and it's proved indispensable. Granted, most of the homework templates are useless past the 6th grade...but the graphing calculator alone is worth buying this product. I am able to use my laptop on team projects for business calculus and business statistics classes-- it's a lot easier to swith between Student's graphing calculator and Excel than it is to squint at a little black and grey 'etch-a-sketch' screen (handheld graphing calculator). The calculator gives you the answer in both decimal and fraction form (makes everybody jealous). It has an equation solver, integrating, solving matrices, permutations, variance analysis are soooo much easier with this than navigating through 50 menus on your TI-84. You get a nice large work area to input your problems... Oh, and did I mention you can copy and paste your problems into Word-- and then edit them with equation editor? (another time saver)--- AND you can save the 'worksheets' with all of the problems you're working on- another great feature if you're going to re-use the same equation with different variables.

Ok- as for the other stuff.... the translator feature is great- It has a Spanish, French, Italian, and German dictionary- shows you similarly spelled words in case you're unsure of the whole word. The unit conversion tool is pretty cool, but not a huge feature. (I use google's coversion tool and m-w.com more often for dictionary lookup). Lastly, most of my classes don't allow me to cite Wikipedia in my papers- so I use the Encarta encyclopedia as a source. The encyclopedia offers interactive maps and video clips with most of the articles-- the pictures are hi-res too if you need to illustrate your document..... This software is worth every penny- though I'd wait for it to go on sale at Best Buy in August for $20 (always goes on sale before school). The other software that I use in conjunction with Student is OneNote.

microsoft student
The progam is too advance for an elementary school student and that information is not mention on none of the product description this product is design for a college student. I will not recommended to any other parent. the software is too complecated and not userfriendly at all and homework help there is none

Gets worse with age...
I've been using Encarta along with Britannica for years. I once believed that for overall depth of content, the higher mark would go to EB. But with regard to software ease of use and organization of material, Encarta would always get the nod. Not so anymore. This new version is a step backward compared to earlier years and seems to be plagued by its own desire to be both a great encyclopedia/dictionary and a homework aid for students. In the end, it achieves only a mediocre showing in both categories.

Just as an example: the new dictionary looks better and has two new tabs for translations and verb conjugations, but performs poorly compared to the 2006 version, in my opinion. It is now almost incapable of recognizing certain word inflections as typed. As an example, take the word "intoning", a present participle of "intone". Well, if you type it in to the dictionary, it will not be recognized as a word...even though if you look up "intone", you'll find the present participle form listed there. So in order to get a match, you must type in the basic form of the word in most cases.

However...some words, such as "intoxicate", have separate entries for other forms (in this case, the present participle "intoxicating"). I don't recall this idiosyncrasy in the 2006 version of Encarta dictionary. In that version, any inflection you typed in would lead you back to the basic form (e.g., present indicative) definition. This new dictionary is actually fairly annoying after a few days of working with it.

It also seems that some words were completely dropped. For example, "reenact" isn't a word from Encarta's perspective. You won't find it under that listing, or the hyphenated "re-enact". But you can find it in Merriam-Webster and practically every other dictionary on the planet. It's almost like they abridged what Encarta had in earlier versions. The weird thing about it is that you can find the word "reenact" in the Thesaurus and Verb Conjugation tabs...but not in the dictionary. What's up with that? Did Microsoft lay off their software testing team?

Perhaps there's some logic to it all. But in my opinion, it comes across as sloppy and not very helpful. I once used the little Encarta icon on my task bar every day. Now I'm opting for Britannica 2008's Merriam-Webster component instead. Oh well, it seems that some good things come to an end through unnecessary tinkering.

not for adults
Unfortunately this is not an encyclopedia and dictionary with student aids, but student programs with the encyclopedia added on. You must wade through all kinds of homework, math, etc. programs to reach the dictionary and encyclopedia. Microsoft apparently thinks that after you leave school you can never have need of an encyclopedia or dictionary again. Also once you load it on, you cannot turn it off. It will run forever on the grounds that you might have to look up something. Once you do get in, the interface is harder to move around in than in the old 2004 edition.

BETTER AND BETTER
ENCARTA 2008 i am a continual happy student! just for the fun of it, this program as with several earlier versions is a wonderful broad based sourse of up graded information, a perfect tool for anyone who just likes to learn as well for ongoing education where ever you want to go. i noticed over the years they have continued to insitefully tweek the performance, i like that too. i call it better & better thank you ron s