Re: Free office ! IBM Lotus Symphony

["Jeff Crosby" <jlcrosby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I installed it at home last night and at work today.  Have only played a
little bit, but it seems really promising.  I opened the most complex
spreadsheet we have (multiple worksheets, cell formatting, auto-update links
among all the sheets, macros, etc).  The auto-updating worked great, the
only problem I found was the VB macro did not work.

Symphony would replace Excel, Word, and Powerpoint.  Thunderbird would
replace the email capabilities of Outlook.  How about an open source PIM to
replace that portion (Calendar, Tasks, Contacts) of Outlook?  And the price
is right.

Could get interesting the next couple of years.  If the marketplace accepts
and embraces ODF, that could cause a real problem for Office, don't you
think?


< I found the following in the Symphony help.  I formatted it a bit to make
it more readable. >

About Converting Microsoft Office Documents
===========================================
IBMR LotusR Productivity Tools can generally open MicrosoftR Office
97/2000/XP documents. However, some layout features and formatting
attributes in more complex Microsoft Office documents are handled
differently in the productivity tools or are unsupported. As a result,
converted files require some degree of manual reformatting. The amount of
reformatting that can be expected is proportional to the complexity of the
structure and formatting of the source document. The productivity tools
cannot run Visual Basic Scripts, but can load them for you to analyze.

The following lists provide a general overview of Microsoft Office features
that may cause conversion challenges. In general, these should not affect
your ability to use or work with the content of the converted document.


Microsoft Word
==============

AutoShapes

Revision marks

OLE objects

Certain controls and Microsoft Office form fields

Indexes

Tables, frames, and multi-column formatting

Hyperlinks and bookmarks

Microsoft WordArt graphics

Animated characters/text


Microsoft Excel
===============

AutoShapes

OLE objects

Certain controls and Microsoft Office form fields

Pivot tables

New chart types

Cell Formatting Conditions

Some functions/formulas


Microsoft PowerPoint
====================

AutoShapes

Tab, line, and paragraph spacing

Master background graphics

Grouped objects

Certain multimedia effects