I was reading the Wall Street Journal when I came across an article about the new program by Microsoft called the Microsoft Student 2006. This is a program designed to ease the work load of Middle and High School students. My first question, was could this aid with College Students as well? Through the sometimes obscene amount of work carried on by college students from homework to other school activities, there must be a way out of this jungle of confusion. Could Microsoft Student be the straight path out from this maze?

Let it first be known that Microsoft student runs on only on PC’s equipped with DVD drives and Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Some of the features that may be of essential use to college students include the ‘Learning Essentials for Students.’ This helpful feature is a set of templates and helps files for Word. And for those who have a lot of papers and presentations due the following day need not worry now for there is a quicker way, Excel and PowerPoint are designed to help students prepare a better more professional paper. However the templates don’t include any content just tips for how create school papers. For those taking foreign languages as majors, minors or just courses have an advantage with this feature. It includes templates for writing in German, French and Spanish.

The Bad

With its promising features it’s disappointing to know that the seemly at first savior for students, Microsoft Student, relies overwhelming on the company’s existing Encarta encyclopedia. And yes hold your breath for this one it does not include Office. Office as we know includes features like Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. So if you don’t own Office you would have to purchase one. According to the writer of the article Walter S. Mossberg the new Program poses to be difficult to use and clumsy. Like we students don’t have enough problems with computers constantly crashing down on us. College and sometimes high school students primarily have homework that deal with research and when we are listless and not permitted by the comfort of our desk chairs to walk to the library, if we could find it, would prefer the convenience of looking up the Encyclopedia. It would only make sense that that should be one of the most powerful attributes of the NEW Microsoft program that plans to aid students and not just a ploy by Microsoft to make money, right? However on the contrary it’s quite the opposite the weakest part of Microsoft Student is the encyclopedia searches. According to Mossberg he put in a search for Joseph Reed a Revolutionary War figure who was a top aide for George Washington. It offered material on Joseph Lieberman and guess this the movie “Airport”. Google search did a much better job.

The Ugly

The unfortunate bitter truth is that Microsoft Student 2006 in some aspects is ok for College students but on a whole it’s a poor investment especially if Microsoft do not improve the program significantly and endeavor to stop seeing dollar bills in every program they develop, but for the good of the consumer, I would have to say in lay mans terms it SUCKS. For formality sakes the price for Microsoft Student 2006 is $100 but cheaper at on-line stores like Amazon.com for $80.