Ability has always offered a lot for a little with its office suite. Version 2002 was our Editor's Choice in the 2003 office suite group test, so we were looking forward to seeing what a major upgrade might bring.

We weren't disappointed either, as there's a lot here that's new. First, one previous omission - a presentation program - has now been rectified and it comes as no surprise that this has a Powerpoint look, with the useful view of slide thumbnails, current slide and notes panes. There is a range of slide layout templates and transition effects, but little in the way of overall designs.

The next new feature is a mail client. This had an air of being 'under construction' and we had trouble getting it to remember the account settings.

It was also prone to crashing under Windows XP. Whether by accident or design, we were pleased to notice that, like Outlook 2003, it blocked remote content in mail messages, such as graphics stored on the sender's server. At the time of writing, the mail client wasn't due to be included in the standard package, but will be available for free download to all registered users of Ability Office Professional.

Moving on to the third newcomer, Photoalbum is broadly similar to the image-viewing facilities in Windows XP, with thumbnail or filmstrip views of your photos. As well as being able to rotate images, you can also flip them horizontally or vertically. More useful is a converter; with a right-click you can convert image files between a variety of formats. Photoalbum also integrates with the other modules as an image browser when inserting pictures. On the downside, we couldn't view the Exif data for digital photos and there was no direct way of opening an image in the Ability Photopaint Studio.

The existing applications also see some major improvements. On the cosmetic front, you now have a choice of interface styles and, if there's any doubt as to the source of inspiration, these include Office 2000, XP or 2003.

Ability Write sees a great leap forward in proofing: there have Autocorrect and Autotext; highlighting of spelling errors as you type; and grammar checkers for English, French, German and Spanish. There is now support for hyperlinks, the facility to print Avery-standard labels and improvements in the opening and saving of Microsoft Word documents. You can now use the Word.doc format as the default, but we noticed that Unicode characters still don't import properly and large Word documents took a long time to open. As in the previous version, you can create Adobe Acrobat.pdf files, and this has been taken a step forward by being able to append content to an existing pdf.

The spreadsheet also claims better compatibility with Microsoft Excel and features a redesigned charting module. However, we still had problems importing charts from Excel, and stability left something to be desired.

Two useful new features are support for 3D cell references and conditional formatting, so you can, for example, colour all cells containing values between specified amounts or dates.

The relational database has always a been a strong contender and there have been a few improvements here, with better Access compatibility, improved security and a revamped Database Manger in which to organise the various tables, forms, reports and other entities.

As for the rest, the Draw application remains firmly at the bottom of the heap, but the Presentation module has a Microsoft Office-style drawing toolbar that offers more scope. The powerful Photopaint Studio now offers vector layers with a small, but adequate, set of drawing tools. There's the common suite-wide Visual Basic Script macro language, but unfortunately no macro recorder.

Overall, it's all shaping up to be another strong contender to the Office crown. Remember, though, that the version reviewed here is still a beta and we can't be sure that all the features - or the problems - seen here will make it through to the final cut.

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

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