IBM Lotus Symphony 1.3

Description

Once upon a time, in the deep, dark recesses of computer history past, Lotus SmartSuite battled Microsoft Office to become the dominant Office suite. Today, of course, Microsoft Office is dominant, while Lotus SmartSuite has become largely a forgotten footnote to history. And that's too bad, because IBM Lotus Symphony (as it is now called) is quite a powerful office suite--and amazingly enough, anyone can download and use it for free. The latest version, (3.0 beta4 download) tries to improve upon what is good with this office suite.

All productivity apps and documents open in their own tabs.

You might be surprised at what you find when you install IBM Lotus Symphony: a slick, sophisticated suite with all the bells and whistles, including a very elegant interface. All documents open in their own tabs, which mean you can have word processing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets all open in the same program at the same time in the same interface--just in different tabs. IBM Lotus Symphony creates and opens documents in the Open Document Format standard, as well as Microsoft Office file formats. It doesn't use the newest Office formats, but few people do, so it most likely won't be a problem for you. So if you're looking for an excellent, free office suite, IBM Lotus Symphony a great bet.