Many users will recognize IBM's Lotus Productivity Suite, which includes Lotus Word Pro (word processor), Lotus 1-2-3 (spreadsheets), Lotus Freelance Graphics (presentation), Lotus Approach (database) and Lotus Organizer (personal productivity.) Symphony, for the time being, includes Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations applications.
To install Lotus Symphony, you have to visit its website and register in order to be able to download it. After the registration the website will ask you which operating system you are using and will take you to the download page. After the download, installation is very easy. The steps are described in Symphony's website. If you have any difficulty, you can just google it with the name of your Linux distribution.
When you start Symphony, you will be greeted with a simple page where you select which application to use. You might have a question why the application has one window to startup rather than having an icon for each program. This is the power of the suite; when you open Symphony, you start all programs. You do not need to open Documents then Spreadsheets and wait for the window to appear. You open your office suite and you are done. To open the Spreadsheets program, you go to New -> Lotus Symphony Spreadsheet and that's it. No bothering to stop your work and go through your operating system's menus. And since the suite starts as a whole including all applications, the integration between them is seamless.
Lotus Symphony brings all these features together with the tabbed interface. Between the program's main menu and the individual application's toolbar, the opened programs are shown as tabs. This brings you the power and ease of use of Mozilla's Firefox.
The icons more or less resemble all the other office programs, therefore we do not expect any difficulty in getting used to the Suite as a whole. Now let's see each application one by one.