Labs

Whichever version of Ability Office you choose, you get a huge amount for your money. The most expensive edition - Professional - costs just £43 and includes a word processor, spreadsheet, database, photo album, presentation module, drawing suite and painting application. Neither of these latter features will worry Adobe, even though PhotoPaint can read and write Photoshop files, complete with layers.

However, the more mundane applications - Spreadsheet and Write in particular - should cause Microsoft a great deal of concern. To a great extent, that's down to the look and feel. You could be forgiven for thinking you're running Word or Excel, and not only the latest editions - the interface can be customised to mimic every edition from 2000 to 2003.

Similar to WordPerfect and OpenOffice, Ability Office can export your work as an Acrobat file (even Microsoft Office doesn't do that), but as an added bonus the Save As option opens a flyout menu with immediate access to commonly used formats, including RTF and HTML.

It's not quite so clever when it comes to importing Microsoft Office documents. Although it had a good stab at opening a range of native Word files, it translated the Thorndale font into Arial rather than Times New Roman, which would have been more accurate. It wasn't entirely happy with embedded charts, either. While it opened our most challenging test file, double-clicking one of the graphs it contained, so we could edit it, threw up a fatal error. The whole system hung, and we were forced to quit through Windows Task Manager. It didn't import Microsoft Word Art either, in spite of having something very similar in the form of its own WriteFX. On a brighter note, Ability Write managed to import all the elements of our Word 2000 training document.

There were some serious issues when it came to opening native Excel spreadsheets. Most importantly, Ability uses 1 January 1900 as its base for calculating dates, while Excel uses 1 January 1904. Every imported date is therefore 1,462 days out. Lotus 1-2-3 had the same problem, but while it warned us that this was an issue, Ability didn't. It's all very well saying Excel is as wrong as Ability, but if you claim to import Excel files you should be converting the calculations too.

Plus, some staple features were missing from the Spreadsheet. There's no way to group a range of columns or rows, and the tab colouring feature that adds a tint to the handle of pages in an Excel workbook instead colours the whole of your spreadsheet

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here. When opening an Excel spreadsheet, grouped cells that were set to be visible were shown, but those that had been collapsed to an outline were ignored and, as such, left out of the imported file.

Conditional formatting is excellent, however, and the dialog through which it's defined is well thought out. You can add an extensive list of conditions to a single cell, although you must be fairly precise in your definitions. Applying one that kicks in after the cell value reaches 20 and another that takes over when it hits 25 won't apply the second condition unless the first one is closed off at 24.

Charts could do with a little smartening up, as they're defined through a text-based dialog that gives little in the way of live feedback until you apply each change. We also found that, in some instances, the default action when plotting one set of data against another was to display both series side by side. However, it does place charts on dedicated blank pages if you choose not to drop them on the same page as the data source. This is a welcome contrast to OpenOffice's practice of dropping 'new page' charts into a container on a regular spreadsheet page. Ability Spreadsheet also makes light work of using photos for chart backgrounds, rather than just colours, which would benefit sales presentations.

Ability Database takes Access files in its stride, and comes with a small selection of pre-defined tables for tracking business records. Oddly, considering the price, there's nothing here to appeal to the home user, such as CD-logging or recipe databases. The simple interface makes it easy to create new tables and build queries without ever seeing a line of code. You can manually edit the SQL that sits behind your creations, but it's easily avoided. We had some problems calling up the form editor, but as we were testing a beta version of the suite we hope this will have been ironed out by the time you read this.

Lastly, Ability Presentations seems the most blatant of all the modules in its Microsoft mimicry, in that it only understands native PowerPoint files. Unfortunately, it had a couple of difficulties with what we'd consider a fairly basic file. We imported our standard test document, created in PowerPoint to take advantage of several of the application's key features. Ability Presentations opened it without complaint, but down-sampled the resolution of a GIF, replaced WordArt with solid boxes in colours that matched the WordArt font colour, and ignored the checkerboard and vertical blinds transitions we'd applied to two slides.

Ability Office leads the pack when it comes to value for money, OpenOffice aside. It looks good and is easy to use, too. What it isn't is a training ground for Microsoft Office wannabes; if you look at it that way you'll be disappointed. However, if you're after a competent, sturdy suite that will read and write basic Microsoft-compatible documents, this is an excellent choice, particularly for home use. Business-critical users with a Microsoft aversion would do better to stick with OpenOffice or WordPerfect for ultimate peace of mind.