Ability Office

Ability Office offers 5 packages in one - including Write, Spreadsheet, Photopaint, Database and Draw.

UK-based Ability first produced an integrated package for the PC in 1985, with a Windows version launched 10 years later. Last year it won our Editor's Choice award and, apart from a few minor upgrades and bug fixes, this is the same product.

Ability Office needs around 40MB of disk space, yet despite this small footprint, you get five main applications - Write, Spreadsheet, Photopaint, Database and Draw.

Launch Ability Write, and the first impression is of a standard Word-like interface. The second is that for a low-cost, small footprint application, there's a lot here.

We were able to open not just Microsoft Word documents, but Lotus Word Pro ones as well - Microsoft can't manage this without a third-party converter. You don't get the XML support seen in the Microsoft, Corel and Star products, but you do get the facility to produce pdf files - another one-up on Microsoft - as well as HTML.

In terms of page layout and formatting, there is pretty much all one could desire, with styles, newspaper-style columns, custom bullets and nested numbering, tables, headers and footers.

There are no built-in drawing tools, but you can insert Ability Draw or Paint objects as OLE (object linking and embedding) objects and edit them in-place. You can also use frames to create a page-within-a-page, so the main text can flow around boxed-in text and graphics, and callouts with arrows explain or draw attention to other items on a page.

A text effects tool, Write FX, is similar to Microsoft Wordart, and it has a good range of textures, fills, shapes and other text tweaks.

Document management isn't so impressive. There are no tools for indexing or creating tables of contents, although there is a competent footnote generator and a tool to caption pictures, tables and other figures.

A macro facility is included, although you can't record macros, and the documentation is minimal. However, this uses the standard VBScript language, and the help file suggests you search www.amazon.com for books on VBScript.

There is a Class Browser, so having learnt VBScript you'll be able to address Ability objects and methods. You can also automate documents with fields and include any of the functions used in the spreadsheet and database. As well as a standard mail merge, you can add information from a database anywhere in a document.

Proofing tools
The proofing tools aren't spectacular: you have the choice of UK or US English in the CD product, with nine additional languages available free from the Ability website.

There's no autocorrect or on-the-fly checking - but this is promised for the next version - and there is no grammar checking, although you do get a thesaurus. We had to download the latest upgrade to get smart left- and right-handed quotes, but these only seem to work on double quotes, not single quotes or apostrophes.

Although the package claims Microsoft compatibility, this is 'up to a point' - we lost graphics and some formatting when opening Word files in Ability Write. As Ability doesn't support Unicode, we also lost letters and symbols above the Ansi character set. Unlike Lotus and Corel, Ability does not provide any 'pi' fonts for inserting special characters.

Ability Spreadsheet gives you 256 sheets in a workbook, each containing 256 columns and 65,536 rows, the same as Excel. As usual, cells on one sheet can reference those on other sheets, so you are not limited to two-dimensional tables.

As with most modern spreadsheets, you can edit cell contents in place or use the formula bar if you want to assemble complex functions. There's also auto-filling of numbered and time-span series, and you can attach pop-up comments to cells - these show as a red corner.

Unusually for a spreadsheet, you have a mail merge facility, just as in Write. You can also reference fields or data in a remote database, and use filters and queries defined in that database while remaining 'in' the spreadsheet. As with Write, you can create and run VBScript macros.

The Ability Database deserves a close-up look. Like Microsoft Access, Lotus Approach and Star Adabas, this is a fully relational database manager. So unlike a flat-file database, which is the digital equivalent of a card file, you can relate different tables of data.

Ability is also compatible with the Microsoft Access mdb, Foxpro, ODBC and Dbase formats. Unlike Approach and Access, however, there are no samples or Smartmasters. When you create a new database, you'll get a tree-like view showing tables, relations, queries, reports and so on.

These are unpopulated until you create your first table of data, but a wizard will help you set up standard tables for things such as customer and product details. After that, you get online help, which is fairly comprehensive and user friendly.

Graphics duo
Ability lacks a presentation creator, although this is promised for Ability 4. It probably isn't a must-have for the smaller business or home user, and there are two graphics applications available.

Ability Draw is a vector-based program offering a minimum of tools with basic shapes such as rectangles and ellipses and a text tool. It uses its own file format, although you can import other pictures, but otherwise there's very little you can do in this application.

The bitmap-editing tool, Ability Photopaint, outclasses its vector sibling. This is a serious image processor, with features such as layers and histogram adjustments that you tend to see in specialist programs such as Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop.

There's a splendid set of filters, ranging from the sensible, such as noise reduction and an unsharp mask (which, despite its name, sharpens the edges in an image), to the silly, such as discotheque lighting and random kaleidoscope effects. There's a range of hand brushes for painting, highlighting, cloning and so on, and even a red-eye removal tool.

Apart from the sorry excuse for a drawing program, Ability is a good, solid package, and the possibilities of the VBScript and database capabilities will attract those with developmental urges. We would, however, like to see a little more handholding for the less intrepid - a few more templates, wizards and sample files would be very welcome.

Contact: Ability Plus Software 020 7231 1004
www.uk.ability.com

System requirements:

• Windows 95 or later
• Pentium
• 32MB Ram
• 50MB disk space

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