Ability Office
Office suite
Ability Office is an office suite developed by Ability Plus Software and distributed and marketed by Ability Software International which consists of a word processor, spreadsheet, database, modules for presentation and photo or image editing, plus a photo/image organizer and vector line drawing application.
01Development history
Development began in 1992 following a decision to replace Ability Plus, an existing DOS-based integrated package, and a first release was made in 1995 called Ability for Windows and consisted of modules for word processing, spreadsheet, database and communications (a terminal program).
A second version was released in 1998 called Ability Office 98. The framework for the entire suite was changed from Borland OWL to Microsoft MFC resulting in better performance and the database was re-written to use the Jet Database Engine.
Since then, modules have been added (an image editing module in 2000 and a presentation module in 2004) but the architecture has broadly remained the same with the step to a fully Unicode version being made in 2008.
02OEM versions
In October 2006, Tesco launched a range of own-brand software that included Tesco Complete Office, a Tesco-branded version of Ability Office.
Corel (Home) Office and Corel Home Suite are based on Ability Office 5.
Sources and credits
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