Ability Office 5

So, I've found an office suite that I thought it would be interesting, and, as probably very few must have heard about it, I decided to make a review. As we only have areas for Movies, Games and Music section, and no software section, I will post it here and if and admin wishes to do it... Create the section and move the post there...

In the meanwhile I'm using the program and seeing what he is able of doing...

nah, here is good, saves me making another sub-forum

Review on Ability Office 2007

Fabricant description:

Price £27.99
Licenses 2

Ability Office Home offers six feature-rich applications in one powerful, compatible and best of all, affordable office suite. Just perfect for working from home, allowing files to be edited and exchanged with those back in the office, and absolutely ideal for students and school children.

It's so easy to get started with Ability Office Home, thanks to its very familiar user interface. Load from, edit and save to Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Adobe Photoshop files, plus all other standard graphics and photo format files.

NEW - now also Windows 7 and Microsoft Office 2007 compatible.

Ability Office Home includes 2 licences for your personal commercial use. Multi user licences are also available for larger organisations, such as businesses or educational establishments. Click here for Corporate Multi User License pricing, or alternatively here for Educational/Charity Multi User License pricing

Write - Microsoft Word compatible word processing
Spreadsheet - Microsoft Excel compatible spreadsheet
Presentation - Microsoft Powerpoint compatible presentation
Photopaint - Adobe Photoshop compatible photo and graphics editor
Photoalbum - Digital image organiser
Draw - Vector-based line drawing and layout software
One Click PDF Creation - Create PDFs within any relevant application
Includes FREE email and web support
Independently acclaimed - Computer Buyer says:
"You get a word processor, a spreadsheet, a photo organizer and image editor, a drawing tool and presentation program, all of which you can install on two PCs under the licence terms. An excellent suite for such a low price."

My evaluation:

Although it has a nice price for the total of the suite, it isn't as featured as Microsoft Office 2007 or as flexible as OpenOffice.org 3.0.1. As what it comes to user friendly, it reminds the layout of Microsoft Office 2003, making the experience easier for people who used that version in the past. Even so, it doesn't support some of the automated responses that other products offer, and, being my version the Portuguese one, I found out the ortographic corrector a bit faulty, as it market true portuguese words as wrongs, and the function "Add to dictionary" not always worked (I had to add the word "stock" seven times during the time I tryed it. It also showed up some dificulty saving documents on other formats like "doc" and "docx", athough it worked well when converting to "pdf" format. It's native format, "AWW", that is the format for Ability Write (The format for Spreadsheets is "AWS", and for presentations it used the format of the Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 "PPT"), but for formats like openXML and OpenDocument, it was needed an extra plugin, bu not always worked. The photoalbum and photopaint utilities, although superior to MS Paint and the Windows Photo Viewer, aren't able of surpass applications like Paint.NET, The GIMP and the Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

Pros:

Price
Ability to convert files to Pdf nativily.

Cons:

User Friendliness
3rd party format support

Resume:

Although it's a nice office application, it isn't nothing special. If you're a domestic user I would recomend you to get OpenOffice.org. If you're a collective person (company, state office, etc), I would recomend you to buy Microsoft Office 2007. Both those programs have more fexibility and utility than Ability Office.