# Lotus Symphony Office Suit matches up closely with MS Office :-)



## Krazy_About_Technology (Dec 2, 2007)

Hi Guys,

With October 2007 issue of Digit, i got the Lotus Symphony Office suite installer like everyone. I decided to give it a try. Apart from some installation issues i found this suit quiet good for general purpose office tasks. It includes a word processing application, a spreadsheet and a presentation program. Quiet satisfactory.

This suit is in Beta version as of what i have but is quiet stable in that too. Installation on Vista did gave some problems and i have to copy the installation source on my hard disk to install it properly. I recommend using the "super" Administrator account present in Vista for installation purpose. 

The program is a bit heavy on RAM, with no files open it took about 66 MB of memory in 2 processes, eclipse.exe and expeditorw.exe, to be precise. Although it doesn't take much after that. Opening the Digit December 2007 DVD contents excel file, it just took 1 MB or so more. Performance is also a little hiccup in the starting, the startup time of application is quiet much and its a little sluggish (On my Celeron 1.6 GHZ 1.24 GB memory laptop), but that could be due to Eclipse Architecture it is using.

But these initial cons apart, once loaded, the application performs great. Loads files quiet faster and rendering of Office documents is pretty much accurate. Only complex formatting in Word documents goes off the point but that is easily curable. This is quiet a necessary feature that almost every user looks for in alternate office applications as still, majority of users out there use pirated or paid versions of MS Office and doc, xls, ppt and like files is a norm while sharing documents. 

Visual Interface is quiet a 'personal taste' related thing and whether it is appealing or not varies from person to person. But in general (or in my personal view you can say  ), interface is quiet clean, pretty and usable.  There is a Properties Sidebar (much like Task Pane in Office) that gives you quick access to the features and properties according to the current situation and object selected. Interface is unified like OpenOffice and you can open multiple type of documents in the same application window. i would also like to mention the handy Open Document button in the top left corner, below the menubar which gives quick way to create new documents, although Open Document is a misleading name for that function.

Lotus Symphony Suite's native format for saving files is ODT or Open Document Format, which is an Open Source, XML based format quickly gaining popularity, specially in open source communities. Being XML based, this format is very portable. Other Formats supported by it include, Microsoft's Native doc, xls and ppt files, IBM's formats like sxw etc, RTF and txt. There is also an option to export the document into PDF format, which is quiet handy, although it doesn't gives any options related to that like password protection in the PDF file, permissions etc.

The famous WordArt feature present in Office applications is also there, known as FontWork here. Its good, but the templates given are very less in number. Spreadsheet application is nice to wrok with and all the usual features including a pivot table look-a-like is also present. A Gallery feature is also present and gives a variety of pictures as well as 3D objects to play with. Presentation application is good as well and includes all the usual features like templates, page transitions and obejct animations, slide layouts etc, quiet usable, but just a little short on features if compared with Office.

Macros are supported in Javascript like language, although it also opens the Visual Basic type of Macros in MS Office documents. But MS Office documents that contains macros in them generally don't work successfully, so this feature is not that usable.

Overall, a good replacement to office for those who are not willing to pay the licensing fee attached with the full fledged office suite from Microsoft. What i like the most is its clean and good looking interface (as oppose to OpenOffice's which looks kind of old fashioned and i personally don't like it) as well as good ability to open and save MS Office native file formats. Another plus for me at least is the good number of clip arts provided that i really need a lot. What more i can say, I am happy


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## infra_red_dude (Dec 2, 2007)

Nice review there 

The only hiccup is the system requirement. Its on the higher side.


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## sakumar79 (Dec 2, 2007)

Also, a comparison of features with OOo, the other free alternative would have been good...

Arun


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## Krazy_About_Technology (Dec 2, 2007)

sakumar79 said:
			
		

> Also, a comparison of features with OOo, the other free alternative would have been good...
> 
> Arun



I thought so, but i don't use it now, and i haven't use it much before so i would not like to comment on it blindly. I just used the Lotus suite and posted what i felt. thats it. 
But will try to do that later sometime.

Thanks for the suggestion brother!


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## Cool G5 (Dec 2, 2007)

Good review.
Let me try it.


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## bikdel (Dec 2, 2007)

good review... but i wanna ask few things...

1. Whats Eclipse architechture? Whats makes it different fronm others? Which other architechtures are there? I though OOo and Symphony are based on same architecture...

2. What exactly are *macros*?


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## Krazy_About_Technology (Dec 2, 2007)

bikdel said:
			
		

> good review... but i wanna ask few things...
> 
> 1. Whats Eclipse architechture? Whats makes it different fronm others? Which other architechtures are there? I though OOo and Symphony are based on same architecture...
> 
> 2. What exactly are *macros*?



1. Well, Eclipse originally was a Interactive GUI Environment Framework that is totally made in java (as far as i know) and uses the concept of java .jar file based plugins to provide functionality as needed. In other words, its a bare bones GUI framework that can be customized by programming language developers for their own language. So using Eclipse platform, there are many IDEs for different languages like Java, C++, Symbian tools etc, that basically use the same framework in the front end and their compilers in back end to provide a complete IDE experience. Its made in java so its platform independent. Lotus Symphony uses this architecture for its GUI. 

Yes you are right, Symphony is based on the same architecture for its backend functionality on the OpenOffice Engine. So it gives a cool looking OpenOffice you can say. 

2. Macros, if said in MS Office lingo, are recorded mouse and keyboard actions (recorded by you of course) that can be 'played back' any number of times to simplify your work. Once recorded, a macro can be assigned a keyboard shortcut or a toolbar button or both  to access it quickly. Macros are stored in the document itself. 

But this definition is somewhat lame. When stripped to bare-bones, Macros are programs written in a high level language (Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) for MS Office, for example) that are stored in the document files itself and are run on a trigger. These programs are written using the object model that the software(for example MS Office) provides. A higher degree of customization of the application features is possible using this approach, although it is not best suited for a newbie. MS Office provides the easy approach to 'write' these programs for your documents as described above. Lotus Symphony supports this approach using a Javascript like language, although it supports opening of VBA macros as well. But i found out that this features (the VBA macros one, i haven't tested the Javascript like macro feature, I just tried opening some old Word documents that i created and used macros in them) doesn't works for most of the times and you have to re-write the code.

I hope i answered your queries. 

I could be wrong somewhere, correct me if you find something incorrect.


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## bikdel (Dec 13, 2007)

bump!!! sorry wasnt online for many days so.. 

anyways nice reply Krazy_for_Technology 

Also I would like to ask one thing...


What about the formatting?... 

I wanted to shift some of my relatives to Open Surce because they were unaware that they are using p*rated MS Office. I could convince them that it is wrong  

As you have defined *Macros*; i am certain they wont need it.. it isnt a SOHO thing i guess...

but They need the formatting to be preserved across the Applications... Like MSOffice, OOo and Lotus Symphony.. Is it possible to maintain it...

Because most of the times the files written in MSOffice lose a considerable amount of formatting when opened in OOo as well as Symphony.. (My Experience)..

any ideas?


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## sakumar79 (Dec 13, 2007)

In general, I have been using OOo for about 3 years now, and I think that other than the odd document, OOo retains most of the formatting of MS Office while reading them... Also, OOo docs save quite well in DOC/PPT/XLS formats, so others will see the documents as you have formatted them...

There are always exceptions to the rules... Which is why I would recommend that you download the free MS Office Viewers to verify that all formatting is retained before sending them...

Arun


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## Krazy_About_Technology (Dec 13, 2007)

^+1 for that


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