Re: Free office ! IBM Lotus Symphony

["Martin Rowe" <dbg400.net@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 20/09/2007, Jeff Crosby <jlcrosby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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 had a brief look at it yesterday. I run Ubuntu Linux, which isn't
one of the supported Linux distros, and though it installed fine it
didn't create the links to start the applications :( As they are
invoked by horrendously long command strings with lots of Java
options/classes/properties, etc I found the only way to run it was to
do so at the end of installation - which has to be done as the root
user - so I didn't take it further.

Symphony is built on the OpenOffice.org 1.x code base, whereas
OpenOffice.org is now at (as of this week) 2.3. I'm assuming with
IBM's announcement of 35 developers to work on OOo that there will be
a relatively quick catch up process. OOo 2.3 is quite an improvement
on the old 1.x versions, and it seems to cope much better with MS
Office files (though doing better still would be welcome).

As an aside I was interested to see that the database export in the
V5R4 version of iSeries Access for Web (5722XH2) now includes
OpenDocument spreadsheet as an option.

Regards, Martin