Microsoft spends millions of dollars on constantly upgrading and adding new features to programs such as Word and Excel. That's why the Microsoft Office suite is so expensive and requires so much disk space and memory to run properly.

Yet most of us barely scratch the surface of these applications, tending to concentrate on just the handful of features we need for our routine work.

This opens up an opportunity for less complex software suites, such as Ability Office, which provide a good range of basic features at a much lower price than the mighty Microsoft Office.

Ability Office costs only £50 but it provides an excellent suite of applications. It contains a word processor and a spreadsheet that look just like early versions of Word and Excel.

That may sound like damning with faint praise but there are thousands of people who are happily running Word 97 and Excel 97, so these two programs should meet the needs of most home and small business users.

The database program is pretty good too and all three programs are compatible with their Microsoft counterparts, so you'll have no trouble sharing files with friends who use Microsoft Office Work Suite or Works.

There's no presentation program to provide a counterpart to Microsoft PowerPoint but most home users won't be too worried about that.

Instead, Ability Office includes a basic drawing program and a photo editor which looks a lot like early versions of Adobe Photoshop and includes dozens of powerful editing tools and special effects filters.

Unfortunately, it lacks the helpful wizards and assistants found in many photo editors, so it may seem a bit complicated.

That's a minor criticism though, and there's no doubt that Ability Office crams an awful lot of very useful software into one very affordable package.

In fact, our only real concern is that technical support is only available via email or fax.

Contact: Ability Software - via website only
www.ability.com

Also consider:

Sun StarOffice 6
Another good low-cost challenger to Microsoft.