Woolworths Home Office review

Kitting out your PC with all the software required to make it useful can be expensive.

The cheapest version of Microsoft Office costs around £300. A good photo editor will set you back around £70, while anti-virus and other vital security software can cost £30-50. Before you know it, you've spent more on software than it cost you to buy the PC. It's barmy - or so Woolworths seems to think. The venerable vendor of unnecessary plastic objects has brought out a range of own-brand software, including such essentials as an office suite and an anti-virus program. No title costs more than £25, and most are much cheaper. We filled our basket and tried them all.

Here's where we let you into the secret: this isn't really Woolworths software at all. It's all made by a company called Formjet, which owns or distributes several software brands. Among these is Ability, and Woolworths Home Office is a rebadged version of Ability Office 4. Formjet also makes own-brand software for other companies, including Tesco.

We've already reviewed Ability (search for 83732 at www.computerbuyer.co.uk), and although it didn't win an award, we definitely like it. It includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a drawing program, a database and a photo album. The drawing program is primitive; the photo album and the database are competent. The word processor and the spreadsheet are both very good. They can open, work with and save to equivalent Microsoft formats, so you'll have no problem sharing files with others. The word processor looks just like Microsoft Word 2003 (or XP, or 2000 for that matter), so anyone familiar with Microsoft Office will very quickly feel at ease.

Given the price difference, there are bound to be things that Word will do that the Woolworths word processor won't, but you'll be hard pushed to find them, so we doubt most home users will run up against any really galling limitations. It's another matter with the spreadsheet. Unlike Excel, it was lazy about finishing off our formulas for us, and had a few glitches. When we created a validated list in one cell, then copied it to another, the validation remained on the clipboard, so we kept pasting it into other cells as well, which was annoying. But most functions worked well; all our Excel formulas were recognised, and we completed a serviceable finance spreadsheet.

While it's not as polished or comprehensive as Microsoft Office, this suite has enough to make your home PC useful or even run a small business.

Author: Karl Wright