IBM Lotus Symphony
Lotus Symphony is an integrated software package. It was developed by Lotus Development and later acquired by IBM. It corresponds in its comparable components of the Office applications other competitors. On January 27, 2012 IBM announced to discontinue the development of Lotus Symphony and instead to support the Open Office project.
History
Lotus Symphony for DOS
The previously published under this name software for DOS contained a spreadsheet (derived from Lotus 1-2-3) as well as word processing, data transfer and database functions.
Program Application and Requirements
One purpose of this was for the company Lotus in the 1980s, an integrated software package, similar to AppleWorks, but to bring for the DOS operating system on the market and 1-2-3 spreadsheet well received by the market Lotus is an integrated word processing extend.
Symphony was a DOS program. About the F10 key it was possible to switch spreadsheet, word processing, data transmission, a table- based database and business graphics among the various program functions. Already in the pre- Windows It was thus possible to divide the screen and work in the screen halves with different program modules to each other. During this process changes had on the one hand, such as the database, just on the other side, such as word processing, from. That was one of the interesting aspects of the software.
Data management within the program was fully in a spreadsheet- like cells format (file extension:. * Wr1 ) instead. The other modules resorted to it, only the display and editing features offered differed from that of a spreadsheet.
Symphony was designed to be able to run in the available memory on a 286 - processor 640 KB completely, plus possibly came through the configured driver as Expanded Memory Extended Memory above 640K.
Related Products
Similar and similar programs were SmartWare, Microsoft Works, Context MBA, Ashton Tate's Framework Enable and Ability Office. Lotus Jazz was the parallel development of Lotus for the Apple Macintosh.
Performance of the modules
The core of the program spreadsheet corresponded completely to that in Lotus 1-2-3.
Compared with the commonly used word processing programs that time such as WordStar 3.3 out of Microprocessor, WordPerfect 4.2 or Microsoft Word 2.0, the text processing Symphony was less versatile, but easier and faster to learn and use.
The database part was compared with the standard packages such as Ashton Tate's dBase III, MDBS Knowledgeman and Borland databases Paradox 2.0 or reflex 1.0, however, inefficient, and let the sophisticated query capabilities of reflex or the pseudo- relational abilities of dBase miss III. The database, however, was fast and could be used within the spreadsheet and easily ( and Others with VLOOKUP ) queried.
In addition, Symphony its predecessor Lotus 1-2-3 as already contained a sufficiently powerful programming language (called a macro language ). The key, however, was the integration of macros: they were from the various program modules (word processing, spreadsheet, etc.) from usable.
For its time it was one of the few programs that allowed data transfer eg from stock market data on the PC and subsequent evaluation after already predefined or interactively entered criteria and display them in a spreadsheet, calculate, could represent in a business graphics and print. This was possible even in unattended batch mode at specified days and times.
Versions
IBM Lotus Symphony
In 1995, the company IBM Lotus and the Lotus 1-2-3 program was part of Lotus SmartSuite.
The IBM 2007, announced and introduced in 2008 version is based on OpenOffice.
A beta version has been available since 18 September 2007. In May 2008, IBM introduced a new version of Lotus Symphony. The product is based on OpenOffice.org 1.x, Eclipse RCP, Lotus Expeditor and uses OpenDocument as a standard format. It contains as part of the text processing applications Documents, the presentation program Presentations and Spreadsheets Spreadsheets. IBM Lotus Symphony also uses tabs so several, even different documents can be displayed in a window. IBM Lotus Symphony has a contemporary, context-sensitive user interface. Another difference is the file filter for Lotus SmartSuite, with which you can open and edit documents created with Lotus WordPro, Lotus 1-2-3, etc.. On 30 August 2008, version 1.1 came out, have been made in the security updates. The published in June 2009 Version 1.3 provides, inter alia, import functions for the file formats of Microsoft Office 2007.
In October 2010, Lotus Symphony 3.0, which builds on the code of OpenOffice.org 3.2 and contains the respective extensions of IBM appeared. Lotus Symphony 3.x supports, among other VBA scripts, the specifications of the open document standards ODF 1.2 and the OLE interface of Windows. The file filter for the Lotus SmartSuite was removed.
The software is available free of charge for the operating systems Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS X, and Linux.