I have recently learned of IBM’s new Office Suite Lotus Symphony. And I’ve got to say so far my first impressions are pretty good. It can do all the things Open Office can do but it has some neat features built right into the GUI. First off is the Home tab where you begin. Here’s a picture of it.

At the bottom is a link that takes you straight to a collection of clip art (it reminds of me some very easy to use software from a while back).

You can see that right off the bat you can click a button and start making documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. As of this writing I’ve yet to see how to create a database type structure but I do see where you can import data once you do have one. Let’s move on to the text documents. Clicking on the document button brings you here.

As you can see from the picture the formatting is very easy to use and all everything you need is right there in easy reach. I hope to write more about this as I use it.

Anyways onto the presentations.

Pretty standard presentation stuff. I don’t make lot’s of presentation files but this pretty similar to MS Office’s old style of Power Point.

Now onto the spreadsheets.

I really like the interface for spreadsheets. Just like the documents all the formatting, charting, and data tools are within a single click. It’s simple. I miss simple. Simple is refreshing. Simple means I can get a lot done very quickly. Lotus Symphony nails the spreadsheet app. Here’s the pic of their interface here.

Symphony has lot’s of plugins available for download often available without leaving the program. They have lot’s of templates (a weakness of OpenOffice) and read Open Office files and Ms Office files (though not the 07 & 10 files yet). All in all it’s a solid office app and I’m looking forward to putting it through it’s paces and testing the updates.

Tags: Office Software, open source office software