Up until fairly recently, Microsoft Office was the primary choice for anyone who wanted to purchase an office suite. Office is about as compatible as you can get, as other suites attempt to match compatibility so they can read and write from Microsoft Office documents. This is essential for any competitive office suites from integrating within the office environment.

Not only are there a range of competitive commercial office suites, such as Sun Star Office, Ashampoo Office and Ability Office, there are free equivalents, such as Open Office and the most recent release from IBM, Lotus Symphony.

Lotus Symphony ships with three modules: Documents, Presentations and Spreadsheets, which means you’ll be able to write documents, produce presentations and calculate your basic finances. Although Symphony supports and pro-actively encourages you to use the new Open Document Format (ODF), all modules enable you to read and write to Microsoft Office documents.

The user-interface is a departure from the normal Office 2003 format you find across most Office suites (as they can’t use the new Office 2007 ribbon interface). It’s somewhere between the two and is certainly fairly easy to use.

Note that this is the official and final v1 release from IBM. Contains a number of bug fixes and updates since the previous beta release.