Lotus Symphony is an office suite by IBM. It’s free.

Free?

Yes, free. From IBM. And yes, I know, "IBM" and "free" never appear in the same sentence, but this time it does. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s available for Windows, Ubuntu, Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux and Mac OS X.

Why it is free?

Because it’s based on OpenOffice.

I will state up from this is not a Microsoft Office replacement. If you use MSO now, you probably wouldn’t switch to this. However, you probably would use this over OpenOffice.

Let’s get into why that is.

Due to the fact many PCMech’ers are still using Windows XP, I used that as my test OS for Symphony. It is required you have Service Pack 3 in XP to run Symphony, so if you’re running SP2, you won’t be able to run it.

 
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Above: The splash screen on startup. I’ll be honest – I felt like I stole this software when I saw this, even though I know it’s free. IBM goes to great lengths even in their free products to achieve a look that is polished and professional. I see the IBM and Lotus, and think, "Whoa.. IBM product. Big deal here."

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Above: Three huge icons. Create a document, presentation or spreadsheet. I find it interesting they put spreadsheet as the last choice and not the second. I also like the fact they have a very-obvious color coding to them. Blues are docs, oranges are presentations, greens are spreadsheets.

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Above: The document editor. IBM does not assign a name to this other than "Document" whereas Microsoft calls theirs "Word" and OpenOffice "Writer".

Although not immediately noticeable, there are several things about this interface that are quite good.

Tabs

I’ll cover this in detail in a moment.

 
Properties editing

I really dig the fact that modifying text properties is just so darned easy in Symphony. Just about everything you would want to do with text is here. And don’t forget the little side tabs:

Style editing

The four mini-tabs on the side are Properties, Style List, Clip Art and Navigator. All serve their purpose and get you to the stuff you need to change/modify with no fluff. This is good.

Even better is the fact you can drag-and-drop these tabs out of the sidebar and have two (or even all four) loaded up at once. Here’s two of them:

..and yes you can drag it back into the sidebar easily. Or have it as a horizontal menu. Or do whatever you want with it. The level of interface customization you can do in Symphony is just plain cool.

It’s all about the tabs

Symphony for all intents and purposes acts like a web browser with the way it does tabs. In fact it even has its own web browser!

If I go to create a new spreadsheet…

This is what happens:

Home, Document, Spreadsheet – all in tabs side by side. No ridiculous separate windows. It’s all contained and you can switch back and forth at whim.

That’s just so beautiful it gets me misty. Someone give me a tissue (sniff)..

Kidding aside, this is a darned convenient way of switching back and forth between open docs, spreadsheets, presentations and web sites.

Also know that most software titles that tries to do the all-in-one thing usually fail miserably at it. Symphony doesn’t and it gets it right the first time.

If I load up Symphony’s browser and load pcmech.com, it looks like this:

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A web browser, in my office suite?

Believe it.

You may be wondering if there are any advantages to having a browser in your office suite. Here’s a simple example:

For webmail that updates the title bar, you can load up your mail in a tab, then go to work on your documents/spreadsheets/whatever while at the same time easily seeing if any new mail comes in. And if so, going to your mail is just a tab away.

Neato.

For those of you wondering what web engine Symphony uses, I believe it "follows" the native engine used in the OS. For Windows, that means it uses whatever IE you have installed. However I want to make clear I’m guessing that’s what Symphony uses for a web rendering engine. If anyone out there wants to confirm whether that’s true or not, be my guest and post a comment on it.

Other stuff that matters

OpenDocument formats

Symphony by default does use the OpenDocument format. This means it will be able to open OpenOffice files easily.

Microsoft Office format support?

Gotcha covered:

PDF export support?

No problem:

And yes you can put security on exported PDFs:

Save as.. file types?

This was one of the few knocks I have against Symphony as it will not save the newer Microsoft DOCX. It will open them, but not save as that type. It will save up to an MSO 2003 format however, which is sufficient for most people.

Note: There might be a plugin that allows to save in DOCX, but I haven’t checked.

What’s the best part about Symphony?

What I liked best is that there’s almost no learning curve to Symphony at all. It feels familiar from the moment you start using it. Things are laid out in a way that just make sense. It can be used by anyone from the novice to the experienced power user.

Who is best suited to use Symphony?

Concerning the PCMech crowd, if you don’t feel like paying for Microsoft Office but also can’t stand OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony is the happy medium you were looking for. It’s far more user friendly compared to OO, beats the ever-lovin’ crap out of Google Docs because of its huge feature set, and hey – it’s IBM. Big Blue makes good stuff.

Even in beta form, Symphony is a fine product. I’m hoping IBM will continue to develop it, because it has the good stuff where it counts.

Lastly, some of you may remember Symphony from version 1.3 eight months ago. That’s old hat. This is version 3 beta 2, released February 2010. It is very recent.

Where to get it: http://symphony.lotus.com/

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