Labs

Ability is another low-priced package that threatens Microsoft Office. The Presentation module is available separately or comes with the Standard and Small Business Editions (£40) or the Professional Edition (£50). It can import PowerPoint presentations, but not *.pot template files, and nor does it have any templates of its own: there's a set of AutoLayouts very similar to PowerPoint's Slide Layouts, but no looks or themes to apply to them, just colour schemes. When we did try loading existing PowerPoint presentations, some elements came out fine, including a detailed graph, but relatively simple text and graphics were often messed

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It's fair to say Presentation is not Ability's finest hour. The user interface imitates the Office style, which works fine in some Ability programs but in this case highlights the relative paucity of features. Where other presentation packages have a visual 'slide sorter' display, showing your whole presentation as large thumbnails, Ability's is just a list. There's no Outliner view or any of the other aids provided in other packages.

If you persevered and managed to construct a usable presentation, you could save it in PowerPoint format or as a PDF. By default, the PDF function outputs A4 pages at 300dpi resolution with each slide in the middle of a page, which is acceptable for handouts but not so good as a means of distribution for onscreen reading. Changing settings produced unexpected results, but we don't know why; this feature doesn't seem to be documented.

Among many other omissions, there's no spellchecker, which may partly explain why the woefully brief Help file invites you to begin by "creating your fist presentation". Despite our misgivings about Microsoft's product, if our boss told us we had to swap PowerPoint for Ability, there'd be a fist presentation he wouldn't forget.