Competition is fierce in the office suite market.
Few suites can match Microsoft Office for collaboration and sheer presence, and Open Office can’t be beaten on price.
So where does that leave Ability Office Business (in effect, version 5 in the series), at a cost of £35?
To start with, it has photo-editing and management elements something that’s missing from both of the aforementioned suites as well as a central launcher.
The launcher sits as an icon in the system tray and acts as a shortcut to the seven programs in the suite.
Ability Write’s look will be comforting to anyone feeling disconcerted by the changes in Office 2007. The icons are attractively designed, the menus are laid out in a familiar fashion and there is even a taskbar.
Ability Write is frustratingly loyal to its own file format. Load an MS Word .doc file, edit it and the press CTRL+S to save and you'll find that instead of saving it in the background, the Save As box appears.
Ability tells us that this prevents incompatible formatting information being lost, which seems fair enough, but it’s still annoying.
There’s no shortage of advanced document features with text effects to play and indexes. It’s simple to create the latter and entries can be hidden to prevent the document from looking cluttered.
File import is particularly good, with support for some older formats, such as Ami Pro and Word Pro. Files can be exported in just as many formats and there is PDF export, too. However, there is no support for Office 2007 documents, nor is there support for ODF, which is harder to understand given it has been an open format for some time.
The Spreadsheet model includes a well-designed formula helper, with tabs separating the various functions. There are about 200 formulas included, some of which can use arrays for more complicated calculations. Worksheet tabs can be coloured, but the colour is then applied to all the cells in the worksheet.
It also failed to open a spreadsheet with some custom functions, but this may be due to the fact that the macros are based on VBScript rather than Visual Basic for Applications. Another limitation to macros is that it cannot record them to be used in Microsoft Office and Open Office, which may be a problem for anyone with existing spreadsheets or who has to share with others.
Ability Presentation continues the trend of the word processor and spreadsheet applications in that it’s easy to use with an interface that will be familiar to anyone moving from Office 2003. However, it suffers when importing documents from Powerpoint. It is put to shame again by Open Office, which managed not only to include the title images created by Powerpoint 2007, but also kept the transparency colour.
The Database module is supplied with some good templates for tables and databases, covering a variety of tasks from cataloguing a home music and film collection to planning a business project.
Finally, Ability has added image-editing applications in the form of Photopaint and Photoalbum. The latter includes the option to organise photos into albums, but it does not support tagging, which would make organising large collections easier. Photopaint, meanwhile, is a solid editor for basic image tweaks, but you’ll need to buy a separate editor for advanced work.
Ability Office Business is very nearly a complete set of programs; the only missing pieces are email and PIM clients. However, the big problem for Ability is that Open Office does many tasks much better and it’s free.
All Office Applications Tags: Office-software, Ability
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