Ability Office 5 Home Edition review

Last year, Microsoft Office got a complete overhaul.

Gone were the long menu lists that hid many of the features. Instead, functions and tools were grouped thematically into tabs. Although it took some getting used to, this made it much easier and quicker to find what you wanted. At the same time, the interface was given a shiny, blobby makeover so it looked more like Windows Vista.

Ability Office, which costs a lot less, hasn't gone for the tabs, and still has lots of very long menu lists to hunt through. All the individual menu buttons and bars still seem to be in the same places as before. Some Vista-style shiny blobbiness has been added, but can be turned off if you prefer.

More substantial is the inclusion of a new Autoshapes feature on a drawing toolbar like the one in Microsoft Word. In fact, it seems almost exactly the same as Word 2007's Autoshapes. This is available to all programs in the Ability suite, and is genuinely useful - as well as long overdue, since competitors have had this for some time. Another new feature across the board is improved task panes. Search boxes no longer float over the top of the program, but sit to the right of the main area, so they don't obscure what you're working on.

The write stuff

The word processor, Ability Write, now lets you add an automated table of contents. It also has a nifty new function that creates charts from data held in tables within the text document, handy for reports. According to the makers, you can now place frames in headers and footers. When we tried, though, every keystroke added a carriage return as well as the intended character. And our text stayed firmly anchored to the bottom of the frame, which got taller with each keystroke. Odd.

Other new functions include the ability to autocorrect grammatical errors such as sentences that don't start with a capital letter, more flexible formatting for tables (including being able to use an image as background, a handy way of placing pictures) and the addition, again overdue, of a 'format painter' to copy styles from one item to another.

Major new features in Ability Spreadsheet include pivot tables and charts that allow you to sort and process data. However, building a pivot table is even more complicated than in Excel, which is saying something. And there are no references to pivot tables in the program's help, leaving you high and dry. There's also a 3D chart function based on the new Autoshapes, a nice touch that enables 3D charts that look a bit like Excel 2007's.

The other modules are Database, Draw, Photopaint and Presentation. The last, Ability's equivalent of PowerPoint, gains better picture support (including transparent PNG files - handy for company logos) and more accurate drawing. Photopaint, the image editor, also sees a few improvements. The Paste Special dialog box lets you fit the pasted area exactly where you want it.

This is the first update to Ability for four years. Some features that should have been there earlier have been added, the interface has had a makeover and some compatibility issues have been ironed out. This is all good stuff, but it's not earth-shattering and it doesn't change our opinion of Ability Office: a good package that's a lot cheaper than Microsoft but has difficulty competing with the also good, and free, OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org).

Still, for only £28 you get a word processor, a spreadsheet, a photo organiser and image editor, a drawing tool and a presentation program, all of which you can install on two PCs under the licence terms. If you'd rather buy software from a company than get it free from a community, or just prefer Ability's style, it could make sense.