Tech tips -
Some time ago I told you about a free office program called OpenOffice. This week I would like to tell you about another totally free office program called IBM Lotus Symphony.
The latest version, 1.2, was released on February 23 and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
You can obtain your copy of Lotus Symphony by going to www.ibm.com, clicking "Support and downloads," "Download," "Trials and demos." On the left hand side of the web page click no-charge products, tools and toolkits."
Now enter Lotus Symphony in the search box. Or, you can go to symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home and click the big orange download button on the top right hand corner of the page.
If you are using Windows, choose that version and then choose your language. I choose to click proceed without an IBM ID, but you can easily create an ID from this page. After filling out the registration information, I clicked the tab and choose to download using http rather than using the Download Director.
Once downloaded, double click the IBM_Lotus_Symphony_w32.exe file (196 MB) to begin the installation that will install Documents, Presentations and Spreadsheets on your computer.
The install is pretty much straight forward, clicking next on each screen until you get to the file type associations. Here you will have to decide to associate Symphony with OpenOffice 1.1 file types and Open Document Format types.
The layout is very similar to what you would be familiar with from using Microsoft Office. You can also open Microsoft Office documents, although, some features and formatting may not save correctly when opened, obviously! You can even save your files as Microsoft Office format.
You might also want to check out the various plug-ins available for Symphony, to extend its capability. Not all of these are free though.
You can get help, support and troubleshooting information via the online user's forum.
All in all, this is a great office product. And, it is free which is especially great for all those who don't want to spend the cash for Microsoft Office.
toddmusseau@gmail.com
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