Lotus Symphony/Notes all the way baby! Now that IBM has put "OpenOffice" or should I say "Symphony" into the Lotus Notes client, that is the direction we are going. What is better than having the most powerful application server / email client along with Open Office all built into one nice portable client!

Goooooooood bye Microsoft! No more $325 Office package just so my users can write an inner-office memo to print and put on the wall.

I have used MS Office 2003 very rarely in the last several years. I use and recommend OpenOffice for nearly everything. Only when a specific situation forces the use of MS Office will I give in. I haven't had a situation like that in the last year.

I hope that my next Office Suite will be iWork '09.

Office is the last bastion Microsoft has in my environment. All of my servers are OS X or Linux, and all of my clients are now OS X. This is a tremendously powerful and easy-to-administer setup, and vastly less expensive than paying out the wazoo to Microsoft for per-user charges.

However, the one big source of trouble tickets we still have comes from Microsoft Office. I would dearly love to get rid of it.

Unfortunately, iWork '08 only imports and exports Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents; it does not directly open and save them. This may sound almost trivial, but it is a major hurdle to deployment. My users need to be able to open a document, make changes, save it, and return it to the person they got it from. Import/export ruins that workflow.

So it is my sincere hope that the next version of iWork, when all the suite's products are in mature iterations, will support open/save of MS formats. The moment that that happens, Microsoft will be gone forever from my network. And good riddance to bad code.

All I can say is ... Go OSS and OpenOffice.org.
I switched my small office of 10 over to OpenOffice.org about 4 years ago thanks to the entire community of contributors, paid and unpaid.
Good by, Microsoft. Did I hear somebody say Linux somewhere? I've started making that change, as well. It works!

It would seem like Deb really does not understanding the marketplace?

OpenOffice has been going strong for MANY years, .. does almost everything better than Office (except for the 1% of users that are totally abusing Excel anyway), provides regular updates, and even has free support for which you don't have to know Indian English!

In our office and for our clients, we enjoy both using and showing off the software that is better quality, more flexible, better supported, and also happens to be free!

If you DO wish a commercially supported product, gee whiz, it's also available from Novell and others.

Why not give eWeek readers a fair picture of the market instead of focusing on just current buzz from your advertisers? If eWeek really wished to give readers a valid picture of current office suites you REALLY need to consider all the mainstream products.

L. V. Lammert

This is great news and I welcome the additional horsepower behind the OO effort. I have used OO almost exclusively for the last 3 years occasionally having to fall back to MS Office to deal with documents/presentations/spreadsheets that contain graphic images. OO has very poor compatibility in rendering images correctly that are embedded in MS office documents. That is my only real complaint with OO.

Way to go Lotus.

It seems that no one is willing to mention the excessive load times of all 3 of the apps in Symphony. Office 2k3 loads in an instant on a 2.8 P4 older machine. Symphony is taking up to 30 seconds to load. Oh, it must be my setup? I guess free makes slow tolerable.

Follow the logic: The new versions of MS Office require Vista to run. Vista is DOA here as it is imcompatible with key line of business application which run on XP. Thus, since Vista is not being deployed, the new MS Office won't be deployed. Departmentally, we are already considering Vista as a key motivator to consider moving to the MAC. IMHO, Vista is the best thing to happen to the MAC since the move to Intel. Personally, my next office workstation upgrade will be a MAC if XP is no longer offered. While running MS Office for the MAC is an option, once you've changed OS, the door to consideration of other non MS software opens signficantly. Open office or IBM's incarnation of it would be top contenders.

Any development of good and cheap office products is a step in the right direction. MS Office is now my secondary "productivity suite" at work. I don't like being so tied into the MS product line and the Open Source organization is definitely having a huge impact on me. Now I'm a little disappointed that Symphony is basically Open Office - if that is true (I'll be my own judge on that). I would have preferred a Lotus SmartSuite interface with the Open Office document format.

I've been testing Lotus Symphony for the past week since Microsoft Support denied issuing a license for my fourth computer. I have 2 laptops and 3 desktops and can you imagine the cost if I had to buy an individual license for each? I went for Lotus the minute it came out and I must say I have not encountered any compatibility problems yet. The clean look of the GUI is refreshing and ease of use is excellent. I'm sold. OUT with Microsoft and IN with Lotus and OO!

WOW! OO - have never really liked it. Too slow and clumsy, slow loading, not versatile - troubles with importing other formats, etc. Exporting a problem, also.

But guess what? For peanuts - about $20 Canadian or $15 USD - you can get Corel Word Perfect - yes, its still out there, available, and a viable product.

Word Perfect Office Suite is everything MS Office should be but isn't - including the right price!

You can import and export virtually ALL other WP formats, you can size and place photos and charts and other items within your text page, pick it up and move it, and have text auto-flow completely around it automatically. You have to find the right settings in the newest MS Office and this feature simply isn't available at all in OO. Not sure about the new Lotus suite?

Additionally, WP Office Suite is still the choice format for virtually every legal office in North America - there's reasons for this.

So if you want something that works, the way you want it to, is compatible with everything else your clients may throw at you, and doesn't cost an arm or a leg - just a wee tad more than free - then consider moving to Corel's Word Perfect Office Suite! You'll be glad you did.

Windy - windy@uniserve.com

Hey Don, check out the system requirements before you start making these statements. Office 2007, according to the MS website, will run on XP SP2. You don't have to go to Vista to run this.

I'm still using Office 2000 at work but WordPerfect (came on my computer) and OpenOffice.org at home on my Win XP Home and SUSE SLED computers. OO works fine but it is so slow to load that I hesitate to use it. Yes, this may be a monopolistic practice of MS since they have special access to the OS to make their apps run better, but when you're just trying to do some work you really don't care about that kind of stuff. You just want programs to load and get to working.

At work I don't have any choice--the "productivity" suite is Office, but for personal use at home, it's always been Word Perfect or Open Office--I don't even have Office loaded on my home computer any more. It would be too much wasted disk space.

Its Microsoft Office 2007 all the way for me. I have the Home and Student Edition running on my computers at home and Enterprise Edition at work. No matter what anybody says, Microsoft gets it right every time with each release. Office 2007 in particular is a compelling release, the new Office Fluent UI makes access to common features more convenient and at the same time more relevant to the user experience.

Features like contextual tabs are a God send when working in PowerPoint or with Smart Draw objects. The file size has also been improved because of the new XML format, also its loads mighty quick on my XP and Vista machines. I have used and experimented with various Productivity Suites and nothing compares to the ease of use, feature set, compatibility of MS Office. Things like doing a vLook up in a spreadsheet or searching for trends with the new BI tools in Excel 2007 are just awesome, its just right there and its really easy.

In Office 2007, its just a better way of doing things, its very logical and straightforward, the tabs are set in a way, it just makes creating documents, editing and reviewing so much better. Other features I like include the Mini-toolbar, I don't have to move from text to the Fluent often, its so convenient. Trust me, once you experience Office '07 you see a complete difference between it and the many alternatives and why so many people continue to choose it regardless of the many free choices.

Someone said they don't have to pay the $325 upgrade price for Office any more because of Symphony, I didn't either, I got Office Home and Student for $120, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, and got a copy of Outlook 2007 for free. Students can even get Office Ultimate 2007 with the mega load for just $60 between now and April 2008. Yes, Office can be used for simple task, but at the same time, when you are working with heavy data and lots of complex formatting, nothing beats it. The time it takes you to do things in MS Office and the ease, makes it a better choice over the competition.

I am not a Microsoft shill by the way.

Open Office or Symphony or Word Perfect.

Anything that uses the ODF standard to save files. I would like to be able to access them again in the future.

If Microsoft offers ODF then I would not have a problem using it, but I will not use OOXML even if it gets pushed through the process of standardization through the brute force and tactics of a single company.

The transition (~ 1990?) from WordPerfect to MS Word was one of the most traumatic experiences of my computer life. My monitor almost got flying lessons several times. I've used Word (and Excel and PowerPoint) from that time to now at work.

About three or four years ago I started using OpenOffice Writer at home. The transition from Word to Writer was easy by comparison with the transition from WordPerfect.

So what's my "home use"? Well, how about a 112 page book, several page styles, many paragraph styles, a few hundred pictures, ...? Published last year, printed digitally from the OOo PDF file, and a hundred copies sold.

Two programs, they both can do what I want done, one costs several hundred dollars every three or four years, and the other is free.

@li you can use neooffice for mac. this is basically openoffice with some new features, aquaified. It opens .doc files just fine.

I am an Arabic\Linux user
i have tested IBM suite on Linux & it really have a good interface, but still have bad Arabic support, and the compatibility with MS office is poor specially for complicated MS word files

some times i use open office.org.. it has a bad interface but a better suport for arabic

at the end i am still using VM to run MS office when i want to send something for my manager

MS office is the last application that holds me down to MS platform and i would be waiting for the replacement

I no longer use MS Office, as the bit I liked was Excel, and I no longer do large spreadsheets, so I am happy with OO. Installing MS Office on Linux would be a nuisance, so I would only do it if I needed to.

That said, I like Gnumeric. My ideal word-processor would be a more polished and developed version of Lyx.