We hope that whatever caused Symphony's installation delays and instances where it froze our Windows XP system will be resolved by the time this beta suite reaches its final release. Nor is it as easy on the eyes as Apple iWork '08, despite rather elegant interfaces. It's not as rich as Microsoft Office 2007, which costs $150 and up. Overall, Lotus Symphony beta appears to be a decent productivity package with features that compare with OpenOffice, Sun StarOffice, and ThinkFree (which offers a handy online component). The Help options from within the applications weren't working during our tests.
We can forgive that for a free software package, but the amount of support provided will depend upon how the fledgling community of Symphony users grows. We were able to sort data and create charts easily without hunting through dropdown menus.Īt this point, support for Lotus Symphony is limited to help provided by other users. Die Suite besteht aus Textverarbeitung, Tabellenkalkulation und Präsentations-Software. But this appears to be a fine program for those who need to use spreadsheets occasionally or don't demand a slew of professional-looking graphical templates. IBM Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 Deutsch: 'IBM Lotus Symphony' ist ein kostenloses Office-Paket. Symphony Spreadsheets also offers fewer graphical options for making bar, pie, and other charts. However, if you don't need so many calculations-or if you've already memorized them, that shouldn't be an issue. We were surprised at Spreadsheets' depth, although Microsoft's software remains the strongest for engineers and others who regularly crunch numbers. Spreadsheets offers a formula bar that supports functions from Excel, but not the same handy dropdown menu of shortcuts. Spreadsheets supports many formulas and features from Microsoft Excel. The program supports charts, but unfortunately, we couldn't find options for adding movies or audio files. We were able to whip up a slide show in several minutes. There's not much hand-holding here, due to the lack of templates, but you'll be able to create a slide show without too much hassle if you're already familiar with other presentations applications. Similar to Documents, Presentations retained most but not all of the attributes of our Office 2007 PowerPoint file. Although we could not open JPEG and other image files, Symphony did let us drag or insert these images directly into our open documents and presentations-although with a delay of up to 30 seconds. We wish that Symphony's word count appeared at all times as it does in Word 2007, but to be fair, most word processing software does not display a running tally, either. Documents even displays the appearance of more than 200 fonts within their dropdown selection menu-although you can't preview them live on the page as Word 2007 does without applying a change. The features within Documents include a spelling checker, footnotes, bookmarks, charts, indexes and tables, and more.