Another microsoft office alternative

[wildman4god]

I was on linuxtoday.com and I saw an artical that introduced me to an office suite called lotus symphony, it is designed to compete with microsoft office and it is free and provided by ibm, weather or not it is open source i don't know or really care (if it handles microsoft office formates better than openoffice and as long as it is free and available for linux it really makes no differance to me if it is open source or not, as long as it is worked, and for the record I think some software should be closed source) Anywho has anyone ever used it, how well does it work?

[ugm6hr]

Lotus Symphony has had lots of publicity.

It is actually based on OpenOffice 1.x and is not opensource (but is free).

I haven't given it a real try, but the general consensus is that OO.org 3.0 is better.

[binbash]

It is slow.Openoffice 3 is better

[ajcham]

It is slow.Openoffice 3 is better

I agree - it is certainly sluggish in comparison with OOo3. In my limited experience, it also seems to do a poorer job of handling MS Office documents.

[geoken]

I think KOffice will become a real contender. I know they don't support OOXML and some people think that it can't be viable without it, but I'm confident when people get the opportunity to run it on windows and see how great it is, demand for such a plugin will result in it's creation.

[wildman4god]

Thanks for your input, if OO.org 3 is better, how well does it handle MS Office formates? any critical glitches? does it handle notes in the margins correctly? etc?

[Johnsie]

Do any of those suites have an equivalent to Access or VBA programming? If not then they are lacking in main features used by many companies and data developers.

[Neural oD]

yes - oo3.org is better - as far as I'm concerned. oO has it's own scripting language and has a comparable Access. Things are done differently in oO though, so with the scripting and the Access like db - it takes getting used to, but mostly it is a breeze to switch over.

[Neural oD]

Thanks for your input, if OO.org 3 is better, how well does it handle MS Office formates? any critical glitches? does it handle notes in the margins correctly? etc?

oo3.org handles MS formats very well - why don't u give it a spin and see for yourself. Granted MS Office is very polished, but you can't complain when the software (oo) is free :)

[forrestcupp]

Thanks for your input, if OO.org 3 is better, how well does it handle MS Office formates? any critical glitches? does it handle notes in the margins correctly? etc?It handles MS formats pretty well, but not exact. You will never find any Office alternative that had to reverse engineer format support that won't have glitches.


yes - oo3.org is better - as far as I'm concerned. oO has it's own scripting language and has a comparable Access. Things are done differently in oO though, so with the scripting and the Access like db - it takes getting used to, but mostly it is a breeze to switch over.
But most companies don't want to spend the downtime, training, money, and testing to retrain their team on using something totally different when they already have Access and everyone is comfortable with it. They would end up spending more money, directly and indirectly, to switch than they would to just update the software that everyone already knows.

I don't have any problem with OO.o's word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation apps, but their attempt at a db app just plain stinks.


But about Symphony. It's very sluggish, it has a dumb interface where everything happens in one window, and it has a lot of bugs. But on the plus side, it has some awesome features that OpenOffice will probably never have, such as their version of MS's WordArt.

[ugm6hr]

so with the scripting and the Access like db - it takes getting used to, but mostly it is a breeze to switch over.

I think switching from Access to OO Base was actually quite a steep learning curve. Easier than learning to use Access from never using a DB before, but, nevertheless, somewhat tricky.

[MasterNetra]

Ever sense i started using OpenOffice I've used nothing else. Even if Microsoft made their suite free I'd probably stick with OpenOffice (mainly because I'm used to it at this point :p). My only issue is that its background and font are based off system colors instead of simply a white background with black text. I found it a bit troublesome with certain color schemes...Although at one point i figured out how to change default coloring..then i forgot how later >.<

[amitabhishek]

I have used Lotus Symphony Beta and it certainly looked polished. The layout was neat and the focus is more on usability. It looked like a commercial software from every angle. I never know it had OO under its hood. Yes its slow to load but once done there is hardly any lag. From a pure average user perspective its worth giving a shot!