A first look at IBM's Symphony office suite

IBM is challenging Microsoft with a game of "anything you can do I can do." Its new Lotus Symphony office suite -- now available as a public beta -- does much of what the $400 Standard edition of Microsoft Office does, only at a much better price: It's free.

Comprising three applications -- a word processor (Lotus Symphony Documents), a spreadsheet (Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets), and a presentation creator (Lotus Symphony Presentations) -- Symphony supports both Windows (XP, Vista, 2000) and Linux operating systems. (IBM says a version for the Mac OS is coming, but it hasn't said when.) Each app can open and save in a variety of file formats, including Office (2003/XP/97; not 2007) and ODF (Open Document Format), as well as save files as PDFs.

The suite is available as a free download. It requires a minimum of 540MB of hard disk space on Windows (750MB on Linux) and 512MB of RAM. In my initial tests, I found that Symphony launched slowly and had noticeable lags with some tasks when operating on a PC with 512MB of RAM, but it ran at a clip on a 1GB system.

IBM doesn't offer direct tech support; instead, it has set up an online user support community to which an IBM support team contributes.

Documents not quite ready to rival Word

Unlike Microsoft Office, which makes you launch its applications separately, the entire Symphony suite opens in a single window with a tabbed interface that integrates all three applications. The feature set and cosmetics of the three applications mirrors Lotus' Symphony office suite from the 1990s, and the look and feel will be familiar to any Office user. Still, there are enough differences between Microsoft's suite and this one to give newcomers pause as they attempt to locate functions. But the learning curve for any user should be short as Symphony's menus and toolbars are intuitive.

Symphony Documents opened my existing Microsoft Word files with no problem. After editing the documents, I was able to save in Word's .doc format or in Symphony's native OpenDocument (.odt) format. One nice touch: I saved a document with 1000 characters in both formats and found that the .odt version had a 66 percent smaller file size (7KB vs. Word's 21KB).

Another nice feature is called Text Boundaries, which places a thin line around the perimeter of the printable part of the document so that you can actually see how the borders and margins are set up. The default page view also has a Text Properties sidebar that offers a convenient way to preview the fonts, font sizes, and special style options (such as shadow or engraved) used in the document. Unfortunately, this view wastes valuable screen real estate, and the only other viewing option is an online view that hides page breaks.