A review of pretenders to the Office throne

Straying off the ranch, I have been testing IBM’s Lotus Symphony, the latest incarnation (in name only) of the DOS-era integrated program of the same name.

For this test, I focused on two aspects, usability and compatibility, as being more important to my constituency than others, since most companies considering any of these programs would probably be doing so with a current inventory of documents already saved in the Microsoft Office format.

Concurrent with this test, I also tested StarOffice, version 8, from Sun Microsystems since it is the suite the Open Office project is based upon.

I also limited myself to three modules of StarOffice, in order to be fair to the three modules currently in Lotus Symphony.

Availability:

Lotus Symphony is available for downloading from IBM’s website, though you would need to Live Search the name to get to the download page; said page being well hidden from prying eyes. At a cost of free, and without the expected registration hassles, I downloaded the software.

StarOffice was similarly not very visible from the default Sun landing page, however, it was only two clicks away. Sun though, required registration before allowing a download. After entering my favorite bugmenot credentials, I acquired it, for the cost of a free 90-day trial as well.

Cost

Currently, Lotus Symphony is free, while there is a cost of about $70 US per annum for StarOffice.

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Editor's note ... check out two more reviews: OpenOffice fan James Gaskin reviews Lotus Symphony (and likes it). Plus, Kevin Tolly reviews Lotus Symphony (and likes it, too).

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Installation

I tested each office suite in a separate x86 Windows Vista™ virtual machine with 2 GB of RAM each. Each VM was pristine, and was patched with the latest updates.

Lotus Symphony took a while to install, the non-standard installer not helping as well. It installed completely.

StarOffice installed completely as well.

Usability

Word Processor

My first thoughts on seeing the Symphony UI: clunky. Taking an inordinate amount of screen space, on the right side of the screen no less, was a vertical toolbar a la Windows Vista’s Sidebar. It also had a GNOME-like feel to it. Aesthetically, it was pleasing….until you realized that the default visible buttons were inadequate for anything other than the most basic of editing tasks.

StarOffice had the Office 2003 interface working for it. Which still has some legs. However, the failings of that UI is also present in the fact that most commands are not exposed to the user; with most being two to three levels deep

Spreadsheet

Both programs sport a basic spreadsheet UI that is virtually generic.

Presentation

Here again, Lotus Symphony’s default page showed that annoying, rather large vertical toolbar.

StarOffice adhered mostly to the PowerPoint (pre 2007) convention, increasing usability.

Compatibility

Word Processing: For this test, I opened the three documents in both program: a 304-page mixed text and graphics document, a 799-page mostly text, (Microsoft Word) default settings document, and a 278-page text-only version of the New Testament, King James version.

The text-only New Testament opened just fine. In the other two documents, graphic elements were misplaced, with lots of unneeded white spaces.

Spreadsheet. For this test, I opened three documents: a small spreadsheet consisting of 6 tabs and a maximum of 400 rows by 6 columns, a spreadsheet consisting of 5 sections and a 2500 rows by 13 columns, and a graphics-heavy 20-section spreadsheet. Somewhat accordingly, this last document presented the most problems, with graphic elements strewed randomly across the page.

Presentation: I used a 36-slide deck, a 46-slide deck, and a 32-slide deck for this test. While the programs opened the documents, it was bewildering to note that some of the text was off kilter. In fact, in one of the slides, some of the text had achieved a 180-degree rotation during conversion!

Without a doubt, both suites could open pre 2007-era Microsoft Office documents.

However, there were numerous artifacts and errors in the presented documents. For basic text, this would not be a big deal, but for companies with a large inventory of elaborate documents, this issue would become problematic very quickly, requiring some reformatting, and probably a labor position created to do just that.

Conclusions

I came away impressed at the improvements in the OpenOffice suites with respect to compatibility with Microsoft Office.

However, all is not well.

Document fidelity is a BIG problem. For inventoried documents of all sorts, this could lead to a catastrophe.

In functionality, the suites are OK if rudimentary documents are all that need to be created. For which I ask, why not use the (free) included WordPad applet in each and every copy of Microsoft Windows?

IBM Lotus Symphony. While this is a beta, it fails miserably. It is slow; very, very slow.

The UI frankly sucks. It is about as counterintuitive as one can get, sort of harking back to a warmed-over OS/2 Presentation Manager UI which, at that time, aimed to shatter the norm and attempted to introduce a new paradigm into graphical computing interfaces.

Furthermore, a feature (I hope it is a bug!) of the program disallows opening more than one document at a time from Windows Explorer. It takes forever to open/convert Microsoft Office documents, and it allows no customizations other that selecting/deselecting allowing the program to run when Windows launches. I forgot: clicking ‘OPEN’ in any of Symphony’s applications, starts a new document! Yes, in Symphonyland, OPEN=NEW! Do I have to mention the training requirements?

Lotus Symphony: A NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME player.

As befits a program in its eighth iteration, StarOffice is a lot more polished and capable than Lotus Symphony. It installed easily, used easily recognizable icons and the UI, while reminiscent of Office 2003, was extremely easy to navigate, and use. Familiarity with Office 2003 would be a selling point of StarOffice, though it also introduced presentation errors into documents created with Office 2003.

Generally, the ODF documents were much smaller than their Office 2003 counterparts were, and fractionally smaller than OOXML documents across the board.

As the expected Messiah for ODF, Lotus Symphony is definitely not ready to take that mantle, and, if it is further developed along the lines currently shown in this beta, it will fail woefully. The clout of its parent notwithstanding.

StarOffice on the other hand, represents the state of the art for the ODF format. If we were still in 2003! It is a poor man’s Lexus to Microsoft Office’s Mercedes-Benz; a somewhat minimally capable facsimile of the real deal.

While impressed by the functionality of StarOffice and the promise (for some, not me) of ODF, I am totally flummoxed by the religious fervor accorded it by zealots.

This is it?

One final thought. Looking at two distinct programs working off the same codebase supposedly, and getting the diametrically opposed user experiences from both, I cannot help but remember that phrase Alex Wolfe used when describing the myriad number of versions of Linux: Linux is a forking mess!

Will the ODF format fall prey to this when it dawns on backers that OOXML and Microsoft won’t be going anywhere? Let the infighting begin.

For help in creating elaborate documents of the kind I utilized in this test, and indeed, for your enterprise using Microsoft Word 2007, I heartily recommend Microsoft Office Word 2007 Inside Out, by Katherine Murray, Mary Millhollon, and Beth Melton (ISBN# 978-0-7356-2330-9). The book (& CD combo) delves deep into what you need to become a seasoned veteran of the Word processing or report creation set. Highly recommended as the only resource. (Plus, I'm quoted on Page 9)

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• Microsoft
• Lotus Symphony
• Microsoft Office
• ODF
• OOXML
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