IBM Lotus Symphony free office suite

IBM's free Lotus Symphony office productivity suite does much of what Microsoft Office can do. And it costs nothing.

IBM is challenging Microsoft with a game of "anything you can do I can do". Its Lotus Symphony office suite - now available as a public beta - does much of what the £300+ Standard edition of Microsoft Office, only at a much better price: it's free.

Comprising three applications - a word processor (Lotus Symphony Documents), a spreadsheet (Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets), and a presentation creator (Lotus Symphony Presentations) - IBM Lotus Symphony supports both Windows (XP, Vista, 2000) and Linux operating systems. (IBM says a version for the Mac OS is coming, but hasn't said when.)

Right now, on the Lotus Symphony site (symphony.lotus.com) it suggests that the IBM Lotus Symphony suite beta requires an IBM ID, and that the user is based in the US. When we signed up for an ID (which is free) we were honest about being in London, and successfully downloaded, installed and ran the beta.

Each IBM Lotus Symphony application can open and save in a variety of file formats including Office (2003/XP/97; not 2007) and ODF (Open Document Format), as well as save files as PDFs.

The IBM Lotus Symphony suite is available as a free download. It requires a minimum of 540MB of hard disk space on Windows (750MB on Linux) and 512MB of RAM. In our initial tests we found that IBM Lotus Symphony launched slowly and had noticeable lags with some tasks when operating on a PC with 512MB of RAM, but it ran at a clip on a 1GB system.

IBM doesn't offer direct tech support for IBM Lotus Symphony; instead, it has set up an online user support community to which an IBM support team contributes.

Word stays at number 1. For now

Unlike Microsoft Office, which makes you launch its applications separately, the entire IBM Lotus Symphony suite opens in a single window, with a tabbed interface that integrates all three applications. The feature set and cosmetics of the three applications mirrors Lotus's Symphony office suite from the 1990s, and the look and feel will be familiar to any Office user.

Still, there are enough differences between Microsoft's suite and this one to give newcomers pause as they attempt to locate functions. But the learning curve for any user should be short, as IBM Lotus Symphony's menus and toolbars are intuitive.

Symphony Documents opened our existing Microsoft Word files with no problem. After editing the documents, we were able to save in Word's .doc format or in IBM Lotus Symphony's native OpenDocument (.odt) format. One nice touch: we saved a document with 1,000 characters in both formats and found that the .odt version had a 66 percent smaller file size (7 kilobits vs. Word's 21kb).

Another nice feature of is called Text Boundaries, which places a thin line around the perimeter of the printable part of the document so you can actually see how the borders and margins are set up. The default page view also has a Text Properties sidebar that offers a convenient way to preview the fonts, font sizes, and special style options (such as shadow or engraved) used in the document. Unfortunately, this view wastes valuable screen real estate - and the only other viewing option in IBM Lotus Symphony Documents is an online view that hides page breaks.

Alas, the special effects you can render in IBM Lotus Symphony Documents are lost when the file is saved as a Word .doc. And while most elements of a Word .doc are transferrable to Symphony, some - such as macros, tracking changes, and special format styles such as drop caps and shading - are incompatible.

When we opened in Symphony a Word doc that had tracking marks, the marks were intact, but we could not accept or reject them. We were also unable to hide or delete them from the page. Similarly, when we created a file in Symphony and formatted text as a drop cap, then saved the file as a .doc and opened it in Microsoft Word, the formatting was lost.

While IBM Lotus Symphony Documents has fewer features than Word, it is still a very useful word processor that comes with enough power for most everyday needs.

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