Ability Office 5 Home Edition review

Ability Office is the budget alternative to Microsoft Office.

The Home Edition comprises a word processor, an image organiser, an image editor, a vector-drawing tool, a presentation program and spreadsheet. The package costs just £28 and comes with two licences, so you can install Ability Office on two PCs.

There hasn't been a major update to Ability Office since version four was released in 2004. That's a long time between versions, so we had high hopes that version five would include some exciting new features. Unfortunately, with a couple of exceptions, the changes feel more like something you'd get in a service pack or update rather than a new product version.

The interface is much the same as that of its predecessor, except that it has a shiny new Vista-style skin. If you don't like this, you can choose one of six other skins available. Other changes that apply to the whole suite include the ability to save to the new XPS format (Microsoft's competitor to Adobe PDF) and the addition of a new autoshapes function. The latter is a welcome addition, bringing Ability's previously basic drawing facilities up to the standard of other office suites. The way task boxes - the Find and Replace dialog, for example - are displayed has also been improved: they appear in a pane on the right-hand side instead of floating over, and obscuring, the document itself.

Write, the word processor, finally has a format painter. It can now create charts based on figures you enter in a table, just like Spreadsheet. This is very handy when you're doing reports. Write is also more thorough about auto-correcting typos and poor grammar, such as sentences that don't start with an initial capital. Table formatting is also a bit more flexible, allowing for image backgrounds. However, we didn't have much luck using one of the other new features - frames in headers. When situated in a header, the frame interpreted every keystroke as a carriage return, which was rather annoying.

The spreadsheet, imaginatively called Spreadsheet, now allows you to include cells that aren't in a single, unbroken block in a named range. You can also now build pivot tables, which allow you to sort and work with data. However, the pivot table tool isn't straightforward and takes some getting used to. There's also a new 3D charts function, based on the new autoshapes feature. Annoyingly, however, you're still limited to choosing the currency of the country specified in the Regional Settings applet of the Windows Control Panel.

Of the other programs, there's better picture support in Presentation (the PowerPoint equivalent), including support for transparent PNGs. Draw now has the autoshapes tools common to the rest of the suite, and the image editor has some updated tools and the ability to copy and paste only specific colours from the RGB colour scale (which is great if you want to turn your relatives green).

We can't get particularly excited about this new version, but Ability is still a good budget office suite. If you don't like using the free, unsupported OpenOffice, then Ability Office is a good alternative.

Author: Karl Wright