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Company: Ability

Description: Launched in 1985 in the UK, the Ability Plus Software gained prominence with its introduction of its own office productivity program package called Ability (in obvious reference to the company’s name). By 1987, the company released a product suite upgrade via the launching of the Ability Plus. In the same year, the British Micro Computing Aware was handed out by Barclays Bank to the company for its distribution of the Ability product suite for personal computers.

There were approximately 250,000 registered users who purchased the product suite by 1989. With substantial market share, the company released Ability Plus product updates in 1992 with the last update happening in 1995. The original suite and its Plus upgrade supported 11 languages allowing for its easy deployment on a wide range of geographic market.


With the growing popularity of the Graphical User Interface based operating system Microsoft Windows, the company released in 1995 its Ability for Windows. This application maintained compatibility with the Microsoft Windows 3.1 Operating System environment. In March of 1998, the Ability Office 98 was released to take advantage of the 32-bit computing architecture supported by the Microsoft Operating Systems Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT.

The Ability Office 2000 was launched to the IT market in March 2000 with native support for the MDB file format of the Access Database. The suite also incorporated a macro programming language along with a multi-worksheet spreadsheet application. Subsequent upgrade provided by the Ability Office 2002 came in December of 2001.

Ability Office Professional v4 was released in August of 2004 and represented the initial version of the software suite which incorporated an Ability Presentation software. This product suite had functionalities which were inherently present in the Microsoft Office 2003 productivity suite. This office suite also represented the initial instance that the AutoSpell function is introduced with its word processing application.

Software applications that are part of the Ability Office Professional are Ability Write (word processing), Spreadsheet (spreadsheet application), Ability Database (relational database management program), Photopaint (bitmap graphics editor), Presentation (slideshow and presentation software), and Photoalbum (picture management application). These programs support deployment in majority of Microsoft Windows operating system platforms.

Ability Office is considered in various computer networks as closely similar to the OpenOffice.org suite which is an open source implementation of an office productivity suite. Ability remains as a favorite for OEM system manufacturers in the UK and reportedly provides extra feature sets compared with the Microsoft Office Suite. It is reported that a Linux system compatible version of the application is under development.

The latest product release was made in June 2008 under the name Ability Office Version 5 with improved compatibility in handling files created by other office suites. Ability also maintains it market presence in the US via its subsidiary Ability Software International (ABI).

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