IBM’s FREE Office Suite

Review by Alan Chang

Although Lotus Symphony is still in beta testing, IBM’s latest release of  Lotus Symphony is a free alternative to MIcrosofft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel that is deserving of your consideration.  Lotus Symphony has more features and a more polished interface than many other free software titles.

IBM Lotus Symphony is a completely free office productivity software suite for Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh and Linux users.

The Lotus Symphony office suite is still in beta testing, and can be downloaded directly from IBM’s lotus site, at http://symphony.lotus.com. Symphony consists of word processing "Documents", spreadsheet "Spreadsheets", and presentation "Presentations" applications. Lotus Symphony’s Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations are direct alternatives to Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and Powerpoint applications.  Symphony’s software code, however,  is largely based on the free, open-source alternative, OpenOffice.

Compatibility

Lotus Symphony saves your work by default in the Open Document Format (.odt). The DudeRated.com writers are big fans of open-source software. We all rock OpenOffice.org on our laptops. As much as we dig the open-source standards, it is important to note that both Microsoft Office and Apple iWork do not support this open-source format. If you save a file in the default ".odt" file extension, you’ll only be able to open the document with an application that can view this extension.  This means that if you send someone a document saved as an ".odt" they will be unable to view it if they use MS Office or Apple iWorks. 

Luckily, Symphony can read files from Microsoft Office (Microsoft Office Basic 2007 available now for $174) and make PDF files, too. You’d probably be better off to simply save your work in Microsoft’s DOC, PPT, and XLS formats if you want to send it to users who might use Microsoft Office software.

For the most part, Lotus Symphony’s compatibility rocks.  However, Symphony does not have the capability to save work in the new Office 2007 formats. You will also be warned when opening Microsoft Office files that Symphony may not support the formatting, which in my testing of this free office suite alternative, was true when opening complex (lots of tables, and formatting) Word documents. Simple documents such as memos, letters and reports maintained Microsoft’s formatting without any problems.

Symphony can support a tremendous range of document types, much more than Microsoft Office.  Much more than the average user will probably ever need. The one thing that brings down the compatibility rating, however is that it does not yet support Office 2007 file extensions.  Other versions of Office work fine, but for some users in a corporate setting, this may be a problem.

Features

Symphony is based on the OpenOffice.org code base, but has a number of tweaks and enhancements that qualify Symphony as a fork rather than a contribution to the OpenOffice open-source development. 

Symphony is a scaled down version of OpenOffice, with the number of features reduced in order to simplify the user experience and interface design of the product.  Office power users may be turned off by the reduction in features, but for the beginner to intermediate crowd, Symphony fits the bill.

Symphony consists of three individual office applications, which are Word Processing, Spreadsheet, and Presentation alternatives to Microsoft’s Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.  Alternatively, OpenOffice.org, which is also free, consists of six individual applications, including database, drawing, and formula apps not included in Symphony. 

The features within Documents include a spelling checker, footnotes, bookmarks, charts, indexes and tables, and more.  Like Documents, Presentations retained most but not all of the attributes of my test Office 2007 PowerPoint file.  Spreadsheets offers a formula bar that supports functions from Excel, but not the same dropdown menu of shortcuts. 

For most users, Symphony offers plenty of features, but power users may want to consider OpenOffice.org.

Speed

IBM’s Lotus Symphony is based on the OpenOffice.org platform, which is known as being a bit sluggish and slow to load.  Symphony is no different.   In fact, the system requirements for Symphony are higher than OpenOffice (512Mb of RAM versus 256Mb, etc.).  At the time of this writing, Symphony did feel slower to load than OpenOffice on my relatively fast laptop.

Keep in mind that Symphony is still in BETA.   The speed and responsiveness may improve by the official release of the software.  At this point, however, I am underwhelmed by the performance.

User Interface

The User Interface is where Lotus Symphony really shines.  The  bluish-gray color scheme and interface is easy on the eyes and simple to use.  I really like the look and feel, and in my opinion feel that it is more attractive than OpenOffice, Google Docs, and the like. The menus, icons and navigation are all intuitve which is a big plus for productivity.

Symphony loses points with me, however, with the default installation.  Annoyingly, Symphony installs three desktop icon shortcuts.  Not a huge deal, but a minor nuisance nontheless.

Overall

The Good: IBM’s Lotus Symphony can support a tremendous range of document types, has features that are sufficient for most of the demands of office suite users, offers a pleasent user interface, and above all is completely free.

The Bad: Symphony is slow to load and will be sluggish on older, less powerful computers.  The features will be inadaquate for power users.  Compatibility with MS Office 2007 is not yet available. 

Lotus Symphony is worth a look, especially if the final release addresses some of it’s current weaknesses.

If you don’t mind spending $175, Microsoft Office Basic 2007  may be a better choice.