

Lotus Symphony 1.3 looks and feels like a recent generation Web browser - in fact, it has a somewhat feature-crippled Web browser built in - in that it employs a tabbed interface for its applications.Įssentially, Symphony lets you open a new spreadsheet, presentation, or document just like you'd open a new tab in Google Chrome or Firefox. Like most office suites, Symphony includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program, but it integrates them in a somewhat unusual fashion.
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Symphony shares some ancestry with OpenOffice - it's based on OpenOffice 1.1.4 source code - but the two products diverged several iterations ago. It loses marks for its format support, in that it can open multiple file types but can really only save to to handful - notably excluding MS Office 2007 file save options.
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IBM Lotus Symphony gets high marks for supporting multiple operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, and multiple flavors of Linux. It's that needless lack of user-friendliness that mars an otherwise great app suite. This clunkiness starts with the download process, which involves over a half-dozen screens, requires the creation of an IBM ID, tries to opt you into affiliate e-mail newsletters, and insists the user actively decide between using IBM's Java-based downloader or a regular browser HTTP download. It's solid, but I wouldn't pay for it luckily, it's free. Symphony is a forward-thinking and relatively full-featured productivity suite, but it lacks polish in some key areas. Can Symphony win a battle of the bands with Microsoft's productivity heavyweight, or does it ring hollow? We sound it out in this review. IBM Lotus Symphony is Big Blue's free alternative to MS Office.
