Hi Guys,
With October 2007 issue of Digit, i got the Lotus Symphony Office suite installer like everyone. I decided to give it a try. Apart from some installation issues i found this suit quiet good for general purpose office tasks. It includes a word processing application, a spreadsheet and a presentation program. Quiet satisfactory.
This suit is in Beta version as of what i have but is quiet stable in that too. Installation on Vista did gave some problems and i have to copy the installation source on my hard disk to install it properly. I recommend using the "super" Administrator account present in Vista for installation purpose.
The program is a bit heavy on RAM, with no files open it took about 66 MB of memory in 2 processes, eclipse.exe and expeditorw.exe, to be precise. Although it doesn't take much after that. Opening the Digit December 2007 DVD contents excel file, it just took 1 MB or so more. Performance is also a little hiccup in the starting, the startup time of application is quiet much and its a little sluggish (On my Celeron 1.6 GHZ 1.24 GB memory laptop), but that could be due to Eclipse Architecture it is using.
But these initial cons apart, once loaded, the application performs great. Loads files quiet faster and rendering of Office documents is pretty much accurate. Only complex formatting in Word documents goes off the point but that is easily curable. This is quiet a necessary feature that almost every user looks for in alternate office applications as still, majority of users out there use pirated or paid versions of MS Office and doc, xls, ppt and like files is a norm while sharing documents.
Visual Interface is quiet a 'personal taste' related thing and whether it is appealing or not varies from person to person. But in general (or in my personal view you can say
), interface is quiet clean, pretty and usable. There is a Properties Sidebar (much like Task Pane in Office) that gives you quick access to the features and properties according to the current situation and object selected. Interface is unified like OpenOffice and you can open multiple type of documents in the same application window. i would also like to mention the handy Open Document button in the top left corner, below the menubar which gives quick way to create new documents, although Open Document is a misleading name for that function.
Lotus Symphony Suite's native format for saving files is ODT or Open Document Format, which is an Open Source, XML based format quickly gaining popularity, specially in open source communities. Being XML based, this format is very portable. Other Formats supported by it include, Microsoft's Native doc, xls and ppt files, IBM's formats like sxw etc, RTF and txt. There is also an option to export the document into PDF format, which is quiet handy, although it doesn't gives any options related to that like password protection in the PDF file, permissions etc.
The famous WordArt feature present in Office applications is also there, known as FontWork here. Its good, but the templates given are very less in number. Spreadsheet application is nice to wrok with and all the usual features including a pivot table look-a-like is also present. A Gallery feature is also present and gives a variety of pictures as well as 3D objects to play with. Presentation application is good as well and includes all the usual features like templates, page transitions and obejct animations, slide layouts etc, quiet usable, but just a little short on features if compared with Office.
Macros are supported in Javascript like language, although it also opens the Visual Basic type of Macros in MS Office documents. But MS Office documents that contains macros in them generally don't work successfully, so this feature is not that usable.
Overall, a good replacement to office for those who are not willing to pay the licensing fee attached with the full fledged office suite from Microsoft. What i like the most is its clean and good looking interface (as oppose to OpenOffice's which looks kind of old fashioned and i personally don't like it) as well as good ability to open and save MS Office native file formats. Another plus for me at least is the good number of clip arts provided that i really need a lot. What more i can say, I am happy
Lotus Symphony Office Suit matches up closely with MS Office :-)
Re: Lotus Symphony Office Suit matches up closely with MS Office :-)
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