Lotus Symphony for DOS
| Initial release | 1984 |
|---|---|
| Type | integrated software |
| License | Proprietary |
Lotus Symphony was an integrated software package for creating and editing text, spreadsheets, charts and other documents on the MS-DOS operating systems. It was released by Lotus Development as a follow-on to its popular spreadsheet program, Lotus 1-2-3, and was produced from 1984-1992. Lotus Jazz on the Apple Macintosh was a sibling product.
IBM revived the name Lotus Symphony in 2007 for a new office suite based on OpenOffice.org, but the two programs are otherwise unrelated.
Lotus 1-2-3 had originally been billed as an integrated product with spreadsheet, database and graphing functions (hence the name "1-2-3"). Other products described as "integrated", such as Ashton-Tate's Framework and AppleWorks, from the Claris division of Apple Computer, normally included word processor functionality. Symphony was Lotus' response.
Symphony for DOS is a program that loads entirely into memory on startup, and can run as a DOS task on versions of Microsoft Windows (3.x/95/98/ME). Using the Command Prompt, and a .pif file, Symphony can also be used on Windows XP and its successors.
Using ALT+F10 the user can alternate among the five "environments" of the program, each a rendering of the same underlying data. The environments are:
Several "add-in applications" can be "attached" and activated, extending Symphony's capabilities, including a powerful macro manager, a document outliner, a spell-checker, statistics, various communications configurations, and a tutorial, which demonstrates Symphony usage by running macros. The program allows the screen to be split into panes and distinct Windows, showing different views of the underlying data simultaneously, each of which can display any of the five environments. The user is then able to see that changes made in one environment are reflected in others simultaneously, perhaps the package's most interesting feature.
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