A tempting alternative - Lotus Symphony for Mac OS X?

I just realised that there was another office suit out there apart from the "obvious" ones, iWork, MS Office and OpenOffice/NeoOffice.

IBM has their own version of OpenOffice, called Lotus Symphony. It is free, as in "it costs no money", but unfortunately it costs time and pain.

I gave it just a few minutes, and found a rather nice looking UI and loads of bugs.


Just finding the installation file on their web site took for ever, and once it had downloaded the 212 Megabyte installation file, it managed to lock up Firefox, so I had to kill the browser.

The installation procedure suggests you associate open document files to Lotus Symphony. I did not do that, and Symphony decided not to tell the OS that it can open the files it creates (open document .odt for word processing). In other words, when I double click a file created by Symphony, it will open in OpenOffice or TextEdit. Not even right-click and "Open with..." works. You have to open the file from inside Symphony itself.

Symphony pretends to support Asiatic languages, but there are so many problems with both input and vertical script, that I would really advice against it.

Symphony actually has a decent amount of Clipart and a "Fontwork" module which is similar to MS Office's Wordart, even though Symphony's version is less flexible.

One reason to at least download Lotus Symphony, is if you want to grab some of the Clipart. You can probably find as good clipart elsewhere on the net, but here is to extract it from an installed version of Lotus Symphony, if that is what you want:

1. Open Applications > Utilities > Terminal.
2. Type: /Applications/Symphony.app/Contents/MacOS/shared/eclipse/plugins/com.ibm.productivity.tools.gallery.common (Do not press enter!)
3. Press the tab key. This will expand the directory to its full name.
4. Type open . (Yes. With the space and the dot.)
5. Press enter. You will get a new Finder window, where you can browse for the clipart. The files are in wmf format, which can be opened by a number of applications, like OpenOffice, Adobe Illustrator, gimp, WMF Viewer for Mac, GraphicConverter and so on, but unfortunately not by Pages or Preview directly.

IBM Lotus Symphony 1.3 definitely has some potential, but they have a long, long way to go with bug fixes, before it can be considered a serious alternative to MS Office or OpenOffice.

If you are hesitating between iWork and MS Office or OpenOffice/NeoOffice, there is currently hardly any good reason to include Lotus Symphony as a fourth option.