Lotus Symphony Beta 3: free office from IBM

22nd December 2007

A third beta version of the free office package Lotus Symphony has been released. The package, produced by IBM, includes the program of Symphony Documents, Symphony Presentations and Symphony Spreadsheet.
Lotus Symphony supports operating systems Windows (XP, Vista), and Linux (Suse Enterprise, Red Hat 5). Symphony can work with different formats of documents, including those used in MS Office. By default, documents are saved in ODF. Documents also can be saved from the program into PDF.
To be true, converting Microsoft Office documents into Symphony is not always performed correctly, as the free version of IBM package does not support macros from Microsoft. In addition, the restrictions relate to documents, which are protected by a password - Symphony does not open file, which was encrypted in the Office, and vice versa.
Symphony package is available for free download, but users must go under registration and receive a free IBM ID number.