Beta Beat: IBM Lotus Symphony 1.2 now available for Mac

This is perfect timing, Apple should trading bundling Lotus Office for the right of that papermaser dude ,...

It may be old, but it rendered the Job Application tables (MS-Word v8) better than any other Office suite I have when I printed it for my technically challenged ex-partner. I had even considered buying MS-Office 2008, just for this application form - but didn't after reading several user reviews. Is Office 2008 really that bad?

Thanks for reminding me about Lisa Office. I don't think that it is really a Mac application, and I wonder how many Lisa's were actually in use in 1983. As an aside, Lotus called it's PC spreadsheet program 1-2-3 because the spreadsheet portion was the 1, and the other numbers represented an integrated word processing program and a database program. I think the spreadsheet was so successful that the other two applications never materialized.

I use NeoOffice daily to work on MS Office PC documents that I download from work. My company supplies me with a PC laptop, but I find it more enjoyable to work on my Mac at home.

I'm not sure if it qualifies as a "Mac" app, but the first EVER GUI- Based "Integrated Office Suite" (on ANY platform!) was actually Lisa Office 7/7, circa 1983, LONG before Jazz, Microsoft Office, or, well, ANYBODY...

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/extras/spotlights/lisa/derschphotos/04.jpg"

Scroll down to the "Literature" section at the webpage below, for scans of original sales brochures for LisaCalc, LisaWrite, LisaProject, LisaGraph, etc.

http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/Apple/lisa/index.php

Interesting, but when you dig a little bit deeper you find that Lotus Symphony is derived from the OpenOffice 1.x codebase. And for all the boasts on the product's web pages that the use of the Open Document Format prevents you from being locked into proprietary formats, the beta is released under a proprietary license. For all purposes, it is a proprietary fork of the OpenOffice code, and quite old code at that.

Personally, I'm going to stick with the Mac-centric NeoOffice.

Actually, also IBM has made Symphony its official document system internally - globally!
MS Office is being phased out unless there is specific need for it... i guess project and visio being the most common exceptions.

IBM is intending to drop its licence count of MSOffice significantly over the coming years...

Leave it to the makers of Lotus Notes (the suckiest piece of of suck that ever sucked a suck) to make such a painful and complicated download process. If they really don't want us to use the thing, then just don't make it.

I remember Symphony: what a great ad campaign for a terrific product. For the time. On the PC. Under DOS. I paid for college modeling paint oven emissions in Symphony on an XT. Ah, those were days. Of course, the reason why we loved Symphony was that it provided a Wordstar-like word processor and simple databasing as side dishes to our real interest, spreadsheets. We LOVED 1-2-3. Worshiped, really. 'Twas like a god to us, almost.

Of course, I always liked working on green screens with fixed characters. Kept distractions to nothing.

Good times.

You will need to make sure you go into preferences and tweak the performance settings to having more than 1GB of RAM. The suite actually runs better after the fact.

Also I agree that the lack of OOXML format is a shame the benefit here is that they have atleast delivered the Mac community something. I fully expect that it will eventually fall in line with the other releases as well as adding the OO 3.0

I am not a tech person but this app almost feels flash based. It is a but laggy (and my macbook's fan kicks in) but it boots quickly.

Nice range of free fonts, minion pro is a nice surprise. I like it at this stage.