IBM Lotus Symphony Review (OS X)

I read that IBM had decided to drop Microsoft Office from their corporate offices in favor of their OpenOffice based word processing system. They were moving towards the open document format and away from the Microsoft based .doc system. Having read that, I was curious to give the software a try. I did a search on Google for the software and downloaded it directly from IBM. I must say, the download took well over 20 minutes to complete and once I got it installed the software was quite slow to load. Much slower than Microsoft Office 2004 was on my Intel based Mac.

Loading speed aside, I was looking for an alternative to Microsoft Office 2004 because ever since 10.5 came out it has been quite unstable. OpenOffice was always an option but it never seemed to render fonts properly or have the same feel of polish that Apple’s own iWork had. I would use iWork but it sometimes renders things differently when the files make their way to a PC – and as a graduate student I need my formatting to stay consistent.

The Symphony suite is nice, but it behaves a little oddly. For instance, when I am typing, the words I type appear in a heavy font for about two seconds before they convert themselves to the proper style. When I’m typing a sentence the cursor sometimes sits on the end of a word even after I have hit the spacebar. If I start typing the space shows up without any problem, but if I hit the spacebar just to be sure I get no response from the screen. In OS X, when I highlight a word and right click on it I can instantly see spelling suggestions – handy if I misspelled something – that is missing when I am in Symphony.

Things that I like about Symphony? The font selector is nice; it shows exactly what the fonts look like before I select them. The interface is clean and easy to navigate. The program lets you save files for use on machines running just about any word processor, from OpenOffice to Microsoft Word, but it does default to the .odt format – Open Document Text.

If I’m honest, I would not pick this word processing software for any real work; the strange behavior it exhibits on the Mac makes it annoying enough to pull me out of my work. I have spent most of this review watching the already-typed text go from bold to normal and wondering why some of the words show up poorly rendered for a few seconds. I applaud IBM’s decision to try and support the open source community and help to make the open document standard more widely accepted, but this software just doesn’t feel right.