Solved Lotus Symphony, what do you think about?

Hi,

I have already tried a text editor from IBM, called Lotus Symphony. I have to say that it is very good in my mind, at least at first glance!

The most striking feature for me is the tabs! We can open multiple documents in tabs, like in a web browser! This is fantastic! I like it.
I think I will turn to use it instead of MS word!
But let me ask, if there some people among you who already tried it and how do you find it?

Personally, I find it very good alternative for MS office, for free! It is lighter too (250Mo) !
One even can open threes documents in the same window: presentation, text document and Excel in same window! Fantastic, non? :sarc:

If you like Symphony, you might want to take a look at the LibreOffice suite. Both applications are independent developments of the OpenOffice.org project and sort of share a code base.

LibreOffice is a full-function productivity suite with analogs for Excel, Project, etc. and more "aesthetic" in my mind, but both the Symphony word processor and the LibreOffice application suite are feature poor compared to Microsoft Office. On the other hand, you can get a license to use Symphony and LibreOffice at no cost (for non-commercial purposes).

Thank you for this feedback. I don't know Libreoffice. I will take a look at it.
But why do you thing that these free software are poorly featured?
What are the "important" features in word that we don't find in Lotus and Libreoffice?

Your qualifier "important" makes this a matter of personal preference/situation and I can't answer that for you.

I find that LibreOffice Writer's document/page standardization tools (scripting/templates/layout/format) are inferior to Word's and that's a big one for me, as is Writer's inability to open/manipulate all .docx files. That's not Writer's fault -- Microsoft gamed the standard body pretty well on that one.

Writer's document collaboration features are weaker than Word's, but, I haven't looked at the current version in that regard. LibreOffice Writer doesn't support VisualBasic macros.

In the past (I don't know if this is still the case with more recent versions) Writer performed poorly with large documents and occasionally got so confused it crashed, taking the current version of the document to digital heaven when it did so.

I suppose these are mostly large organization issues. A single user or SO/HO that doesn't need any of those features willprobably find LibreOffice sufficient, but then again Google Docs, Microsoft's LiveOffice or even Window's writer (if you add an outboard spell checker) would probably be suffcicent, too.

Symphony suffered all of the above plus was very slow when I looked at it, but that was some time ago and newer versions may perform better.

rbmorse said:

...as is Writer's inability to open/manipulate all .docx files. That's not Writer's fault -- Microsoft gamed the standard body pretty well on that one...

Click to expand...

OpenOffice (and those based on it) can easily open/manipulate OpenXML files easily. It is just xml files in a zip archive. The specs for those documents are an open standard thinks to the standard body it went though. Anyone can look at them. The only thing stopping OpenOffice is the developers. There was nothing "gamed" by Microsoft.

logicearth said:

rbmorse said:

...as is Writer's inability to open/manipulate all .docx files. That's not Writer's fault -- Microsoft gamed the standard body pretty well on that one...

Click to expand...

OpenOffice (and those based on it) can easily open/manipulate OpenXML files easily. It is just xml files in a zip archive. The specs for those documents are an open standard thinks to the standard body it went though. Anyone can look at them. The only thing stopping OpenOffice is the developers. There was nothing "gamed" by Microsoft.

Click to expand...

Thanks and sorry for this late answer.