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Properties for Text, Pages and Paragraphs show up in a sidebar to the right that is similar to the sidebar in Lotus Notes 8. These properties change based on which productivity tool you are in and what you are doing at the time. The properties dialog can even be undocked and can float to give you more real estate on the screen.

Symphony's properties box

Features

All three facets of Symphony work pretty much like you've come to expect from office productivity suites.

Documents is the word processor for Symphony. Fonts, formatting, colors, spacing, and tables are all easily accessible and a snap to use. It also includes things like word counts, indexing options, footnotes and more. Anyone who has used Microsoft Word should immediately be comfortable.

Presentations is the PowerPoint equivalent in the Symphony suite. You can create slides, speaker notes, and even more advanced pieces like transitions and animation. The clipart included is fairly basic, and the special effects aren't as sophisticated as the most recent PowerPoint releases, but in general you can get excellent results.

IBM Lotus Symphony Documents

Spreadsheets has all of the standard formulas and formatting options a normal Excel user will encounter on a day to day basis. It does fall short a bit with the lack of pivot tables and some other advanced functions however. If you are a hardcore accounting person that is used to all of the advanced features of Excel, Symphony Spreadsheets aren't going to cut it for you.

In general, I think that a 90/10 rule applies. Ninety percent of users probably use only10% of the features of Office. Those 90% will be able to use Symphony without an issue. It will be that last 10% of power users that will have to stick with Office. That's okay, I think most organizations would say they would be happy if they could save 90% of their software costs when it came to office suites.

One other thing to consider is that out of the box, Symphony saves documents in the international standard Open Document Format. If you need the most compatibility, youwill probably want to change your preferences to save in the Microsoft formats. Symphony can read most previous Lotus Smartsuite and Microsoft Office formats, but currently doesn't support opening the latest Office 2007/08 formats. Support for those types of files is planned for next year.

File Types Preferences in Symphony

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