Photos: Dinosaur sightings: Lotus Symphony 3

Symphony's windowing system could also allow you to work concurrently with other types of documents from within your spreadsheet and to switch between them, giving the illusion of a multitasking system. For example, you could create a letter in a "Doc" environment while working on a spreadsheet in "Sheet."

However, this system involved a bit of smoke and mirrors in that rather than being separate entities, the other documents were actually embedded in unused cells in the currently active spreadsheet. This was a pretty clever trick--you could say the spreadsheet provided the infrastructure for the whole package.