Lotus Symphony Beta 4 vs. OO.o

[igknighted]

Very quick observation... I have been using OO.o Impress to view the presentations (made on MS powerpoint) for class lectures, and very often they are badly mangled. After several weeks of putting up with this, I remembered that Lotus Notes (our school email is on a domino server unfortunately, so Notes is all we can use) has office components built in. When using the presentation software included with Notes, the MS created slides looked perfectly normal. Thinking maybe IBM was on to something, I downloaded the latest version of Symphony and it works (and looks) exactly the same as Notes 8. MS Powerpoint created slides look exactly like they should.

What does everyone else think? Have people noticed better MS Office compatibility with Notes/Symphony, or is this just a quirk I have found?

[FuturePilot]

Hmmm. Maybe I should try this out. Are there any extra features that Symphony has that OO.o doesn't have? I've used OO.o for a long time and for the most part I like it and it works, but it does have a few quirks I don't like.

[RAV TUX]

I only use Google Docs.

[igknighted]

Hmmm. Maybe I should try this out. Are there any extra features that Symphony has that OO.o doesn't have? I've used OO.o for a long time and for the most part I like it and it works, but it does have a few quirks I don't like.

I really haven't played too much with it. I think it's worth a shot to look at, after all it is FOSS. It is expandable with plugins too, although I haven't checked them all out yet.


I only use Google Docs.

I use Google-almost-everything (Calender, Email, Homepage, etc.) and try to use Google Docs as much as possible, but it also butchers the PPT slides. It is slightly worse than OO.o but nowhere near as bad as Kpresenter 1.6 (haven't tried the 2.0 series yet).

[zmjjmz]

Hold on.
Is Symphony FOSS?
Or is it just free?

[igknighted]

Hold on.
Is Symphony FOSS?
Or is it just free?

I didn't read the license, so I can't say for 100% sure... but I have always heard its open source, and their page/brochure is littered with phrases like "Three new alternatives to proprietary solutions that can save you money". It's built on code from OO.o and is on the open source Eclipse platform, so I would guess that it also is open source.

EDIT: Apparently not... there seems to be some confusion about that as well, since they do seem to use LGPL'ed code. At least they support open standards like ODF

[argraff]

This program is HUUUUUGE! (283 Mb).

I'm so used to Add/Remove...I'll post my thoughts when/if I get it running!

[forrestcupp]

Well, it's not FOSS. They used OO.o v. 1.x so it wouldn't have to be. But that doesn't bother me if it is worthwhile.

I love it's features. I love the things it can do that OO.o will probably never achieve, and I love the interface.

But there are a few things about it that I just can't get past, which will hopefully get fixed soon.

The fonts look too heavy
It doesn't support formatted pasting, which is a huge minus
The documents have to open within it's main window that is used for every type of file. Because of that, I can't have separate default window sizes for spreadsheet files and documents.


If they could get these things worked out, it would be a champ.

[igknighted]

This program is HUUUUUGE! (283 Mb).

I'm so used to Add/Remove...I'll post my thoughts when/if I get it running!

OO.o is roughly the same size, you just don't see the file size with add/remove