Ability Office Business (PC)
£27.64
Abilty beats Microsoft any day of the week - Where do I start? I orignally had microsoft office vista and it was terrible. I went onto amazon to look at ability office due to a recommendation from a friend it s just like office but a fraction of the price and a fraction of the space useage on your hard drive, trust me. Well I did value this person s opinion and anything that would remove the annoying low disk space message on my mini pc, eee pc 901. It worked and I can t begin to explain how alike microsoft and ability are. It looks exactly like office 2000, before microsoft put everything in confusing and annoying menus and mixed up where everything is. I think ability is so much better than office and I would definately recommend this to anybody who is thinking of buying a new computer and needs an office package or if someone is becoming dipondant with microsoft office as you can only now buy the vista version. I bought the business use for approx £40 compared to microsoft which would be about £400. I would choose ability any day of the week. I can t help but enthusase about it, it s like the difference between Panda anti-virus and norton the product looks the same but the practically unknown brand wins every time. Tell everyone about it.
Some Bugs Need to be Fixed - Like the previous reviewer I saw this package on the shelf of a local computer store, and bought it because of its low price and the fact that it included a database program. As the previous reviewer stated it installed easily and didn t require registration/activation - but perhaps this is a problem because Ability Software has not replied to even one of my messages about the product. I wonder whether they think I am not a legal owner/user of the software? Ability Office 4 included a 60+ page booklet to help the user get started. This is absent from the Ability Office Business box. A pity, I think.Despite being interested in the database program I have spent much more time with the word processing (Write) and spreadsheet applications. In both of these there seem to be some bugs. For example, in Write, it is easy to format a new document (i.e., one started from a blank page) to have page numbers. But I have struggled to insert page numbers into an existing document that lacks them. The page numbers seem to be placed on top of the existing text...The charting component of Ability Office is shared across several applications. I found that the charts are rather hard to edit. In the case of X-Y charts the help system informs you cheerfully that you can edit the categorical axis as well as the value axis. In my copy of Ability Office Business this proved impossible. A menu for editing the category axis exists, but opening the various options for editing the categorical axis simply shows a blank form. I also found it impossible to edit the legends on charts - one cannot even delete them.The spreadsheet application of Ability Office 5 has additional functions compared with Ability Office 4. However some of the additions are not the same as the equivalent Excel functions. All the new regression related functions only work on bivariate data, for example. There is now a pivot table feature in Ability Spreadsheet. Features such as goal seeking and what if analysis tables are missing from the spreadsheet.I played with the scripting features of Ability Office Business version 5. Macros and scripting are important features in office software, I think. Anyway, the implementation in Ability Office is a built in editor and macros facility fairly similar to VBE. Macros cannot be recorded (I haven t found out how to do it, anyway), but a script based on VBScript, can be written. The online help has a somewhat thin description of the macros facility and of the Abilty Office Interface model and a very thin outline of VBScript. (A newbie would certainly be lost, I think). The script editor in Ability Office Business has some bugs. For example, I have found it impossible to copy portions of text to the clipboard and paste them back into the script at another position, or even to another program (such as Write). The majority of the help file dealing with Macros concentrates on macros for Write, and programming the database application. Not mentioned in the help file is the fact that a forms editor exists but is not directly part of the macros menu. The web page for Ability Office 4 has a document outlining how to use the forms editor, but there doesn t seem to be any material available for version 5, though the forms editor exists in version 5.I haven t spent much time with it, but the presentations program in Ability Office 5 seems rather thin compared with Powerpoint.Overall it is an interesting office suite with a wide range of packages for a low price. But version 5 seems to have some bugs and I haven t found Ability Office at all responsive to requests for help.
Microsoft Boycott Starts Here: Buy Ability! - For your money you get ability write equivalent to microsoft s word , ablity spreadsheet equivalent to microsoft s excel , ability database equivalent to microsoft s access , ability photopaint equivalent to adobe s photoshop , ability presentation equivalent to microsoft s powerpoint , ablity photoalbum equivalent to microsoft s picture manager and ablity draw equivalent paint , all for a minuscule of the price microsoft is asking.It s extremely compatible with microsoft office. All I did was open up a word document in ability and it immediately intergrated into the programme. None of the longwinded importing and exporting nonsense you have to do with some of the other equivalent to microsoft software out there. There are some features I had to get use to, one is when I used the spellchecker. I expected it to jump out like a pop up box as in word but in ability it opens up at the side.The dictionary options is way ahead of microsoft, (in terms of ease of use). If you want other dictionaries it s so easy to download them from the website and open. There are lots of them ranging from afrikaan to zulu. With word I remember having to faff about adding and making things default.At the moment I can t fault this great software. I didn t have to put in a product key nor activate it, (even though it says that on the packet), I just installed it and was away. I now use it on my desktop and my laptop and I d thoroughly recommend it to all.A very good buy.