[1] By 2008, the complete English version, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles,[2] numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive content, timelines, maps, atlases and homework tools.

[citation needed] Microsoft published similar encyclopedias under the Encarta trademark in various languages, including German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese.

[7] By 1989, the software company struck a non-exclusive rights deal with the publishers of the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, and considered a rewrite of the material.

Thus the final Microsoft Encarta can be considered the successor of the Funk and Wagnalls, Collier, and New Merit Scholar encyclopedias.

[citation needed] In 2000, the full Encarta content became available on the World Wide Web to subscribers, with a subset available for free to anyone.

The premium editions contained over 62,000 articles and other multimedia content, such as 25,000 pictures and illustrations, over 300 videos and animations, and an interactive atlas with 1.8 million locations.

Encarta's articles in general were less lengthy and more summarized than the printed version of Encyclopædia Britannica or the online Wikipedia.

Like most multimedia encyclopedias, Encarta's articles tended to provide an overview of the subject rather than an exhaustive coverage and can only be viewed one at a time.

[citation needed] A sidebar could display alternative views, essays, journals or original materials relevant to the topic.

[30] Encarta 2003 incorporated literature guides and book summaries, foreign language translation dictionaries, a Homework Center and Chart Maker.

Encarta's Visual Browser, available since the 2004 version, presented a user with a list of related topics making them more discoverable.

Encarta's user interface was shared with Microsoft Student, and was streamlined to reduce clutter with only a Search box which returned relevant results.

The globe had multiple surfaces displaying political boundaries, physical landmarks, historical maps and statistical information.

One could selectively display statistical values on the globe surface or in a tabular form, different sized cities, various geological or human-made features and reference lines in a map.

[35] Before the emergence of the World Wide Web for information browsing, Microsoft recognized the importance of having an engine that supported a multimedia markup language, full text search, and extensibility using software objects.

The hypertext display, hyperlinking and search software was created by a team of CD-ROM Division developers in the late 1980s who designed it as a generalized engine for uses as diverse as interactive help, document management systems and as ambitious as a multimedia encyclopedia.

[citation needed] Encarta was able to use various Microsoft technologies because it was extensible with software components for displaying unique types of multimedia information.

It used short sentences from the Encarta website, and sometimes displays full articles in the Internet Explorer-based browser on the right.

[citation needed] The editors of PC Gamer US nominated Microsoft Encarta '95 for their 1994 "Best Educational Product" award, although it lost to the CD-ROM adaptation of The Way Things Work.