Lotus Symphony

Been using a new office suite on my Mac recently. It’s called Symphony and is made by IBM Lotus, based on OpenOffice. What IBM Lotus have done is taken OpenOffice, making it in to an office suite better suited to an office environment. IBM Lotus Symphony can be downloaded for free from the Lotus Symphony web site.

At the moment Symphony has a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software built in, along with the ability to add plugins. There is also a web browser built in as well which is useful for surfing the web, while you are using the software, as it saves you switching to another web browser. Symphony is fully compatible with OpenOffice as it uses the same Open Document standard file type that OpenOffice uses, as well as being compatible with Microsoft Office versions up to 2003 - Office 2007 file types are not yet supported, tho I guess they are coming in a future release.

I noticed that when using the word processor a formatting sidebar appears on the right hand side of the screen, and this is useful for selecting text size, font etc. This sidebar also appears in the Spreadsheet and Presentation modules as well, providing useful formatting commands for the file you are working on

I hope that IBM Lotus improve Symphony even further, perhaps adding some of the other OpenOffice tools such as Base and Draw. I think it is great addition to the office suite market, and will help showcase how good OpenOffice and its derivatives are. All in all if you are looking for a good office suite at no charge, give Symphony a go, I think you will enjoy using it.