IBM Lotus Symphony Beta review

Creating a new page in the presentation involves going through another dialog to name the page and choose the layout. The dialog presents a thumbnail but that only shows one possible layout, not changing whether you choose "Title, Chart, Text" or "Title, Table". With separate dialogs to set transitions and animations it can be quite difficult to make professional looking presentations.

The spreadsheets component is reasonably competent as far as it goes but also has inconsistencies. You can set the shadow on a cell from the side bar but not the border. To do that you need to use a modal dialog. There are useful functions such as VLOOKUP to get values from a table but no way to validate that input conforms to one of the values in a list. Charting is slow and clunky on all but the simplest examples.

Format support

Symphony's default file formats are ODF (Open Document Format) as used in OpenOffice, StarOffice. It will open and save Microsoft Office files from Office 97-2002 (XP). But it doesn't support the Office 2003 or new Office2007 file formats (OOXML). When you open a Microsoft Office file you're presented with a generic message which says "this document contains features and formatting that may not save correctly when opened". It doesn't specify which will be lost or mangled.

The verdict

Confusing menus and toolbars and a preponderance of separate and modal dialogs makes IBM Lotus Symphony more difficult to use than it should be. While we welcome another competitor to the market, Symphony in its current form is mightily out-gunned by Openoffice 2.0, also free, which has all the same features, plus plenty more. We'll keep monitoring this upstart's progress though, and bring you a full review of the suite on www.pcpro.co.uk once it makes release.

Author: Simon Jones