Labs

You get PLENTY for your money when you buy Ability Office 4: a database, a drawing program, a photo organiser and a photo editor, a presentation program, a spreadsheet and a word processor. That's more than Office 2007, at a tenth of the price. You can also get it even cheaper in the form of rebranded versions such as Tesco's £20 Complete Office.

The word processor, Ability Write, looks very much like Microsoft Word before its 2007 makeover. Beyond this, however, we found its performance mixed at best. The macro function doesn't record, so you have to write your macros by hand. There's no function to create a table of contents or an index. Advanced formatting is very tricky; compared to some of the other word processors here, we found it difficult to get text, images and other elements placed exactly as we wanted them. It isn't a desktop publishing program, though, so we didn't hold this too much against it. On the plus side, formatting text is easy; the spellchecker works as you type, and there's a good, customisable auto-correct function. There's also an easy to use mail merge. Write can save documents both as Word files (.doc, not .docx) and as PDFs. If all you ever do is write letters, Write has all the features you'll want; demanding business

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or academic users might find it lacks things that they need.

Colour scheme aside, Ability Spreadsheet is also a lot like its Microsoft equivalent, Excel. Spreadsheet handled both basic maths and advanced formulas well, and supported all the Excel formulas we tried out on it, with the exception of COUNTA, where it rather confusingly used COUNT instead. Annoyingly, it didn't autofill the closing bracket in a formula, which Excel does, and we were a little taken aback to discover that the program simply chooses a currency for you, based on Windows' regional settings. What if you also buy or sell in euros or dollars? Like almost all the other spreadsheets here, it couldn't expand a range of cells which had been grouped in Excel, which was frustrating.

Tables and drawers

Ability Database can save files both in its own native format and as a Microsoft Access database. It's easy to create tables, forms and queries and to make links between related fields in different tables. In many ways Database is very much like Access, but the options in its Design View are much more limited, giving you less control over how data is handled in each field. The program opened both Access 2000 and Access 2003 files, but in both cases important formatting was lost. A few glitches aside, though, this isn't a bad database.

Ability Presentation looks the part. It can edit PowerPoint files and can save to PowerPoint and PDF. However, it doesn't come with any templates, its user interface is basic and there's no spellchecker.

The suite also includes a photo editor and a photo organiser. Photopaint Studio provides good basic adjustments and 'artistic' filters. Photoalbum, on the other hand, is so basic that Google's free Picasa program is better. Draw, the vector drawing program, is also basic, and isn't easy to use.