Today [18 September 2007], IBM plans to post on the Internet a package of its own software with applications that square off against components of Microsoft's ubiquitous Office suite -- a word processor to rival Word, a spreadsheet to go up against Excel and business-presentation software as an alternative to PowerPoint.
I have downloaded it, 137 MB , have not yet booted it up, will report if and when. It's called IBM Lotus Symphony.
Dennis if all you need is a basic word processor then look into abiword or openoffice. Abiword is pretty nice and is a small basic word processor.(has more features then works.) And openoffice is of course a whole replacement.
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The reviews of this lotus thing I've read havent been good. Most have said its worse then just plain openoffice.
IBM has gotten so much from the OpenOffice.org office suite to enhance its own products that the company has decided to finally give back in a big way: It's joining the open-source project and will contribute code, developers and other resources for free.
In an announcement Monday, IBM said that by joining the effort directly, it hopes to develop feature enhancements and help push broader adoption of the OpenDocument format (ODF) standard used in the suite.