IBM Lotus Symphony BETA - Free

Posted by Graham Rhind
Oct 17, 2007 at 09:31 AM

I’m not sure I want to dignify some of these comments with a reply, but here goes:

quant wrote:
>it must be very
>strange book without any of the basic features ...

William Shakespeare managed without footnotes and indices. It is a reference book and is structured in such a way that only the chapter names are required to find the required data, as each chapter has the same structure. Indices and tables of contents would cause problems anyway because it is currently published as a pdf instead of hard copy, and the page numbers are dependent upon the size of paper being used if printed. The book therefore has no page numbers. And nobody has ever complained about its layout - in fact, in a survey of users I did last year nobody wanted the format or structured altered. So there we are - I make no apologies for the for the form the book takes - not all books are academic tomes.

>writing 1000 pages document in word, you must be either masochist or bill gate’s
>relative.
>- books typeset in word are ugly, it’s a fact

Neither, and that perhaps proves my point that Word could manage the task very well - I have a very low tolerance to software glitches, as you’ll know from my feelings about Ultra Recall, for example. I’ll hop products as soon as they give me problems. As I mentioned above, the book is published as a pdf, not typeset, but we all know that definitive statements about beauty and ugliness are not grounded. As it happens the book has to use a single font because it contains data in hundreds of languages, and only one font set allowed me to do that. Personally I don’t like the font or the layout very much, but it’s for reference and nobody cares as long as they can get their information from it.

>You were saying that no office suit could
>convert the M$ documents properly. Well, it’s not their problem, it’s because of
>proprietary M$ formats! Now you have a chance to test and start working with free soft
>(for example Open Office which is great) that implements open document format ...
>take that chance and soon you’ll see you never get back to M$ office

With respect, I did not apportion any blame as to the reason for incompatibility between office suites. As I also mentioned I HAVE tested all of these programs - OpenOffice, Ability and Lotus (older version). They were not up to the task I set for them. As I also said, other software will suit other people for what they require. Not me.

>can you post a link to any of your books? Is it on
>Amazon or google books for a preview?

Yes, but that wouldn’t be useful to this discussion because in all three cases the publisher has typeset the hard copy versions and added tables of contents, indices and so on according to their own house rules. They typeset in a program other than Word, obviously (and made a right hash up of it), but I supplied the data in Word and that is how I maintain the files (as in one case the book is updated and released every 6 months). That book’s software link page is at http://www.grcdi.nl/book2.htm - there’s a sample from the book there, but that’s been printed from Whizfolders, not Word.

I get a little weary of constant Microsoft bashing just for the sake of it, and I don’t really want to get into one of those discussions. My point was that alternatives to MS Office are not always as all encompassing as they claim and are not in all cases a worthy alternative.

Graham