Freely downloadable, Lotus Symphony marks IBM's re-emergence into the office suite marketplace, long after Lotus Smartsuite last made a fresh appearance. The twist this time, of course, is that it's a free project, and one with a reasonably narrow focus.

The tools provided with the installation - which spins out of a comparably slim 135MB download - cover word processing, presentations and spreadsheets, and the three are all managed in the same container window. Thus, if you have a spreadsheet, a presentation and two word processing documents on the go, then you can jump between them via Firefox-esque tabs at the top of the screen. This takes a little getting used to, it's fair to say, especially when the Windows taskbar does much the same job, just a little more flexibly.

The installation was simple and breezy, although the program tried to go online when it first started up, which never really wins favour with us. But when we set our firewall to block it, it carried on working with no problem. So our first port of call was the document word processing tool.

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This, by default, layers the traditional formatting options down the right-hand side of the screen, although it's easy to switch that off for a full working window. It also tries to auto-complete words for you as you're typing, and while it carries out spelling checks on the fly, it doesn't automatically correct errors.

Its default output is the Open Document Text format (ODT), but the application is compatible with all major word processing formats (save for Office 2007), even if it did struggle with bullet points and advanced formatting when parsing some test Word documents. It should be noted that it's not the nippiest of word processors, either.

In terms of spreadsheets, the tool has the appearance of a familiar Excel opening screen, and for basic work it's a competent enough option. It failed to convincingly support the more advanced features of imported spreadsheet files we tried, and it's even more sluggish than the word processing application. It left us with the feeling that it was trying so hard to react to, and adapt around, what we were doing that it forgot to respect the fact that we were trying to work.

The final element is the presentation module, and again, a few speed issues aside, at heart this is a competent enough tool. It's fairly straightforward to knock up a passable presentation, and the interface is intuitive enough to let you get on with it. But there's nothing Earth-shattering here.

Based upon a stripped-down version of the OpenOffice core, the key problem with Lotus Symphony was that we couldn't actually see much point to it. It's not particularly quick or slimline, it doesn't have any discernible identifying feature of note, and nor does it find favour over virtually any competitor that you could mention. It's entirely competent, occasionally annoying, but ultimately puzzling.

Not a bad collection tools, but it's difficult to see what IBM is attempting to achieve with them. Sure, the cross-platform support is worthwhile (an ironically-larger Linux version is available), but that's already been covered by finer competitors.