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IBM Lotus Symphony Review
By Larry Hendrick | September 24, 2007
I was excited when the news broke about IBM releasing their branch of OpenOffice as a free download. Not for the reason you think—yes, free is nice, but I wanted to see what they had done with the interface. Like different distributions of UNIX, I imagined all sorts of additional tweaks implemented by the crew at IBM.
OpenOffice is one of the tools in my bag, so I’m familiar with how it looks and works. What changes or improvements did IBM implement in their version of the open source Microsoft Office competitor? That was the question I wanted to answer.
What I Like
As soon as I opened up the software for the first time, I liked the overall appearance of the application. The look is new (for me), and the overall feel is nice. They didn’t crowd all the options onto the toolbar, opting instead to use a single icon toolbar at the top and a sidebar for currently relevant options.
The normal functions are present on the toolbar, but with a little something extra—a tab. This is definitely different than my version of OpenOffice.
Opera introduced tabbed browsing several years ago, and now it’s a standard feature on browsers. This is the first time I have seen it in a word processor or a spreadsheet. In my brief time using the software, I can see several advantages.
- You can open multiple documents in the same frame.
- You can open a combination of program types.
- You can rearrange the tabs with drag and drop.
- You can drag and drop between applications.
- It’s a clean interface for multiple document types.
What I don’t Like
The first project I tried required merging several .csv files. Prowling the toolbars didn’t reveal an Import function, and after digging in the help files with no luck, so I opted to Open the file. That brought up an import options menu similar to the one in Excel under Import, and it worked for the first file.
The problem occurred when I tried to Import, Merge, and/or Open the second file, adding it to the bottom of the already present data. I wanted both files in one spreadsheet, but it was proving elusive. Every thing I tried opened an new tab for the second file. I couldn’t find any information in the Help file, so I ended up doing a Copy and Paste.
For two files as small as I was working with, Copy and Paste was adequate, but if you need to blend two large spreadsheets with thousands of lines of data … no way!
This Beta version from IBM isn’t going to replace Office for hard-core users. If you need any of the advanced features of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, you’ll need to keep your copy of Microsoft installed. But, it offers another choice to home and small business users who only need the basic functions from these programs.
I plan to use Symphony for a while to discover other hidden trinkets.Later, I’ll let you know what I’ve found.
Topics: Business, Technology |