Homework assignments are the bane of most students I know not to mention their hard pressed and nescient parents. This is mainly because of the tedious and mind numbing chores of data mining and composition. Additionally as knowledge multiplies every 5 TO 10 years few parents and teachers are able to keep up.

Enter Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium 2009 a productivity suite which includes English and foreign language dictionaries Spanish, French, German, and Italian a thesaurus a quotations and citation library assignment templates tutorials a graphing and equations calculator software and a Web Companion.

MS Student comes replete with the entire Encarta Premium 2009 encyclopedia and its dynamic atlas and provides online access to the feature rich MSN Encarta Premium through October 2009. Ink Handwriting Support allows the user to work with Tablet PCs and Ultra Mobile PCs and recognizes handwritten math problems.

There is little need to introduce the Encarta Encyclopedia 62,000 articles thousands of Web links, vetted by the encyclopedias editors videos, sound clips interactive maps, including geopolitical, climatic, and topographical 2 D and 3 D tours of historical events a Dynamic Timeline of thousands of eras and events and Encarta Kids for children under the age of 12.

Last year, Encarta released only 15 updates compared to almost 50 the year before. This year started more auspiciously, with 3 updates and 3000 corrected or new articles added to the Encyclopedia in its first two months since its release in June.

The previous versions of Encarta comprised a host of homework tools. Three years ago, these have evolved into a separate product called Microsoft Student. Since then, it has been gainfully repackaged and very much enhanced. This year, MS Student can only be downloaded from the Web. It is no longer available as a standalone, packaged product.

Among the new or revamped features

To augment the performance of MS Student 2009, Microsoft offers Learning Essentials preformatted report and presentation templates and tutorials designed for Microsoft Office XP and later. MS Students templates are actually clever adaptations of the popular Office suite of products Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. They help the student produce homework plans and schedules, science projects, book reports, presentations, research reports, charts, and analyses of problems in math, physics, and chemistry. Detailed step by step tutorials, Quick Starters, and pop up toolbars menus guide the student along the way in a friendly, non intrusive manner.

The Ace in MS Students deck is Microsoft Math. It incorporates a step by step math solutions calculator, math textbook solutions, Triangle Solver, Equations Library, tutorials, and foreign language help.

Microsoft Math is a seemingly endless anthology of tools, tutorials and instruction sheets on how to grasp mathematical concepts and solve math problems, from the most basic e.g fractions to mid level difficulty e.g trigonometric functions. And if this is not enough, there is free access to Hot Math, an online collection of math study aides and problem solvers.

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