Ability Office

MS Office is undoubtedly the standard in desktop business applications. It is used in many businesses and homes around the world.

Nevertheless, its high cost, which can reach a maximum price of more than $500, makes it unaffordable to many people. Ability Office is a lower-priced alternative to MS Office. But low price does not mean low quality. The components that make up this suite have all the main characteristics of their MS counterparts, and even their interface is very akin to that of Office, thus making it easy to use to those accustomed to Microsoft programs.

Although it lacks some of the bells and whistles of its MS counterpart (for example, Presentation, Ability's alternative to PowerPoint, doesn't have such a vast clipart collection), it is still a good option, since it has two programs that are absent from MS Office. The first one is called Photopaint, which is an image editor with many capabilities, very akin to Adobe Photoshop. And the second one is Photoalbum, which does exactly what its name implies.

In additiona to the lack of a clipart collection, Presentation has not any drawing tool. For creating drawings and graphics for this program, you need to use the Draw program, which makes you use two instead of one single program to perform the task.

This new version is fully compatible with Windows 7 and MS Office 2007, and you can choose the pack that best suit your needs (Home, Graphics and Business, the later being the most complete).

You can evaluate the trial version during 30 days. If you find the program useful, then you should purchase the full version, which includes two licenses to use the suite on two different computers. This is also a great advantage.