IBM’s free, cross-platform Lotus Symphony now MS Office 2007 compatible
You may not have read much about Lotus Symphony – OpenOffice.Org casts a pretty big shadow over other free Office competitors. Like OpenOffice, IBM’s cross-platform office suite is based on the Open Document format and is a very capable alternative to Micorosoft Office.
Symphony doesn’t provide the same number of tools as Office or OpenOffice, but it does handle word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation tasks. The latest release adds a much needed piece of functionality to Symphony – the ability to open files created using Microsoft Office 2007 (though files can only be saved in 2003 or 2000 formats). A Flash-based presentation of Symphony’s features is available for viewing, and there’s also a transcript available if you would rather read them yourself.
One I particularly like is the tabbed interface. As with the tabs in my browser, it keeps my workspace just as tidy whether I’ve got a single document or dozens open at the same time.
The suite is roughly a 200Mb download for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and is available from the IBM web site. There’s also a large, online library of clipart for you to utilize in your documents.
