Ability Office is an office suite developed by Ability Plus Software and distributed and marketed by Ability Software International and which consists of a word processor, spreadsheet, database, modules for presentation and photo or image editing, plus a photo/image organiser and vector line drawing application. The current version (V11) offers a level of compatibility with Microsoft Office, allowing users to create, load from and save both to Microsoft Office 2010 (*.docx etc.) and earlier (*.doc etc.) file formats. In the same way, the photo and image editing application will create, load from and save to Adobe Photoshop (*.psd) file formats, together with other mainstream graphical file types.
Not only can version 6 be downloaded from the Ability website, older versions are also available for download. The most recent version is version 11.
Development history
Development began in 1992 following a decision to replace
Ability Plus, an existing DOS-based integrated package, and a first release was made in 1995 called Ability for Windows and consisted of modules for word processing, spreadsheet, database and communications (a
terminal program).
A second version was released in 1998 called Ability Office 98. The framework for the entire suite was changed from Borland
OWL
Owls are birds from the order Strigiformes (), which includes over 200 species of mostly solitary and nocturnal birds of prey typified by an upright stance, a large, broad head, binocular vision, binaural hearing, sharp talons, and feathers a ...
to Microsoft
MFC resulting in better performance and the database was re-written to use the
Jet Database Engine
The Access Database Engine (also Office Access Connectivity Engine or ACE and formerly Microsoft Jet Database Engine, ''Microsoft JET Engine'' or simply ''Jet'') is a database engine on which several Microsoft products have been built. The firs ...
.
Since then, modules have been added (an image editing module in 2000 and a presentation module in 2004) but the architecture has broadly remained the same with the step to a fully
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
version being made in 2008. Ability Office is 100% C++, entirely 32-bit and uses the
Microsoft Visual C++
Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC) is a compiler for the C, C++, C++/CLI and C++/CX programming languages by Microsoft. MSVC is proprietary software; it was originally a standalone product but later became a part of Visual Studio and made available i ...
2005 compiler.
New version 8, released September 2018, includes Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Database, Photo-editor, has a Microsoft Office 2016 style interface, is compatible with Windows 10 and all Windows versions back to XP, supports ODF import/export, allows switching interfaces between traditional toolbar mode and ribbon style, supports for 4k/hi-res displays, supports OOXML import/export — native support for docx, xlsx, pptx, and is free for personal (non-commercial) use.
OEM versions
In October 2006, Tesco launched a range of own-brand software that included Tesco Complete Office, a Tesco-branded version of Ability Office.
Corel (Home) Office, Corel Home Suite are based on Ability Office 5.
Version summary
Source:
See also
*
List of office suites
*
Comparison of office suites
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of office suites:
General information
Platforms listed are for when a local application is available that does not require network connectivity to function.
Office Suite ...
References
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External links
Official website
British brands
Office suites