#Ibm lotus symphony 1.3 mac os
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Like OpenOffice, Symphony honors a list of regular expressions that let you create complex find/replace command strings. My personal acid test for word processors is the ability to use the find/replace function to making formatting changes. Robust functions that aren't found in most Web-based apps - like mail merge - are present and usable, though not spectacular. For example, Symphony has a very solid spellchecker but no grammar-checker or thesaurus. Lotus Symphony presents a document interface very similar to a MS Word 2003, though there are just enough quirks to give Word power users pause. They're a good idea in principle, but I had trouble finding a practical application for them. For example, you could write a widget that reformatted addresses on the fly. Widgets are somewhat like Google Gadgets crossed with MS Office Macros, in that they can analyze data in your documents and process them in the sidebar. An online user wiki is your best source of help information, and you can link directly to document templates, plug-ins and widgets from the Symphony Web site.

#Ibm lotus symphony 1.3 software

Web connectivity is nonetheless quite essential to Symphony, even though it's conventional software and not a Web app.

The tab system also has the advantage of letting you toggle between multiple docs and sheets easily, though I recommend not doing the same with the extremely poor built-in browser. This is handy, but opening too many sidebars can crowd out the actual document. When you open a specific tool set, it often generates a sidebar or menu-bar that stays onscreen until you close it.

Each of these tabs shares a standard menu layout, which means commands don't move around like they do in the current MS Office ribbon interface. Lotus Symphony 1.3 looks and feels like a recent generation Web browser - in fact, it has a somewhat feature-crippled Web browser built in - in that it employs a tabbed interface for its applications.Д®ssentially, Symphony lets you open a new spreadsheet, presentation, or document just like you'd open a new tab in Google Chrome or Firefox. Like most office suites, Symphony includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation program, but it integrates them in a somewhat unusual fashion.

#Ibm lotus symphony 1.3 code

Symphony shares some ancestry with OpenOffice - it's based on OpenOffice 1.1.4 source code - but the two products diverged several iterations ago. It loses marks for its format support, in that it can open multiple file types but can really only save to to handful - notably excluding MS Office 2007 file save options.

#Ibm lotus symphony 1.3 mac os

IBM Lotus Symphony gets high marks for supporting multiple operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, and multiple flavors of Linux.

It's that needless lack of user-friendliness that mars an otherwise great app suite.

#Ibm lotus symphony 1.3 download

This clunkiness starts with the download process, which involves over a half-dozen screens, requires the creation of an IBM ID, tries to opt you into affiliate e-mail newsletters, and insists the user actively decide between using IBM's Java-based downloader or a regular browser HTTP download. It's solid, but I wouldn't pay for it luckily, it's free. Symphony is a forward-thinking and relatively full-featured productivity suite, but it lacks polish in some key areas. Can Symphony win a battle of the bands with Microsoft's productivity heavyweight, or does it ring hollow? We sound it out in this review. IBM Lotus Symphony is Big Blue's free alternative to MS Office.