Lotus Symphony To The Rescue

If you are an Office 2003 or 2000 or XP user and get a file from an Office 2007 with the X extension names and can't use the file, read on.

This morning, as I was about to file my quarterly IRS and state reports, I went to open up my instruction document so I got it all done properly and found one of my files was in a .docx extension.

So naturally the machine I am using couldn't read it. It was then I realized that this machine had not been updated with Lotus Symphony 1.3 which was released last month(the link takes you to the download page).

Download all 200MB, took 10 minutes here in the UK, and then installed it and a few minutes later up came the document perfectly fine.

Now some will argue but it doesn't work 100% with office. You know what? Nothing works 100% with Office, even Office! As was seen when Microsoft realized previous versions couldn't read the new extensions either.

So if you are using an older Office suite, download Symphony today and start using it and soon you will see you don't need that other suite. I have been exclusively using Symphony since January 1, 2009 and started using it more or less since it was available in beta last year.

What is so wrong with an entirely FREE suite of products that look and act the way you want it. In this case it solved my problem and I Imagine many other companies out there, when they get off their Microsoft hamster wheels, will realize that to pay for something when you can get it for free just makes no sense.

Of course, if it's free, how does IBM make any money you might ask, but you have to ask them about it.