Lotus Notes 8 — Productivity Tools

IBM Lotus Documents

IBM Lotus Presentations

IBM Lotus Spreadsheets

These productivity tools are also referred to as document editors, since you use them to create and edit documents in various formats (word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets respectively).

Productivity Tools Integration with Notes 8

The Eclipse architecture of the Notes 8 client supports the integration of other applications. One key example of this is the integration of the productivity tools. The preferences for the tools are in the Preferences interface. When opening the preference options for the productivity tools, you will see the following:

This setting will load a file called soffice.exe. This file corresponds to a stub that remains resident so that the tools will launch more quickly. If you do not want this to occur, choose the setting not to pre-load the productivity tools.

The productivity tools are independent of the Domino 8 server. This means that the tools will function without a Lotus Domino 8 server. They can even be launched when the Notes client is not running. To do this, either double-click on the icon on your desktop, or select the program from the Start menu.

Productivity Tools and Domino Policies

A Domino administrator can control the productivity tools through a Productivity Tools policy setting. This gives the administrator the ability to control who can use the tools (and also control whether or not macros are permitted to run). It will also control what document types will be opened by the productivity tools.

IBM Lotus Documents

The IBM Lotus Documents productivity tool is a document editor that allows you to create documents containing graphics, charts, and tables. You can save your documents in multiple formats. IBM Lotus Documents has a spell checker, which provides for instant corrections, and many other tools that can be used to enhance documents. No matter what the complexity of the documents that you are creating or editing, this productivity tool can handle the job.

IBM Lotus Presentations

The IBM Lotus Presentations tool will allow you to create professional presentations featuring multimedia, charts, and graphics. The presentations tool comes with templates that you can use to create your slide shows. If you wish, you can create and save your own templates as well. The templates that you create should be saved to the following directory: Notesframeworksharedeclipsepluginscom. ibm.productivity.tools.template.en_3.0.0.20070428-1644layout. (You can save a template in a different directory, but you'll need to navigate to it when creating a new presentation from that template.)

Not only can you apply dynamic effects to the presentations, but you can also publish them in a variety of formats.

IBM Lotus Spreadsheets

As its name indicates, IBM Lotus Spreadsheets is a tool used to create spreadsheets. You can use this tool to calculate, display, and analyze your data. As with other spreadsheet applications, the tool allows you to use functions to create formulas that perform advanced calculations with your data.

One feature gives you the ability to change one factor in a calculation with many factors so that the user can see how it effects the calculation. This is useful when exploring multiple scenarios. IBM Lotus Spreadsheets also has a dynamic function that will automatically update charts when the data changes.

Summary

In this article, we have reviewed the productivity tools provided with the Notes 8 client. These tools include IBM Lotus Documents, IBM Lotus Presentations, and IBM Lotus Spreadsheets. We have briefly examined how these tools are integrated with Notes 8, and how they are controlled by Domino policy documents.