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Microsoft no longer offers a stand alone retail purchase of "Office" that does not require an online Microsoft account to install or use. Even what you purchase at retail in a store requires a Microsoft online account to install or even to just obtain the actual product key. So we no longer buy it. Office 2010 will be the last version we use.

Our next version of "office" will be Apache Open Office, the low cost Ability Office (which has enough features for us), or even Word Perfect/Quattro Pro (from Corel, who amazingly hasn't screwed these up). It will NOT be a Microsoft product.

• EditPlus Programming editor
• IrfanView Image viewer with effects and image manipulation capabilities
• Putty so I can SSH to my Gentoo from winblows
• Ability Spreadsheet as opposed to the spreadsheets in microsoft office, open office, and gnumeric
• Proxomitron Web-filtering proxy
• Flashpaste Copy/Paste on steroids
• WinRAR as opposed to winzip
• uTorrent as opposed to azureus and other java based boulder-weight crap
• mIRC IRC client
• DVD Shrink Rip/decode/encode DVDs, etc.
• Tail for Win32 Wish tail under linux was this good
• RealAlternative as opposed to realplayer
• Virtual Dimension Virtual desktops, as opposed to microsoft's power toys

From the link: "Latest Windows 2003 look and feel". Snort!

It looks exactly like MS Office to someone who uses MS Word to write shopping list.

On a related note just how good/bad is Ability Office that Tesco are repackaging? Panda AV is ok, but does Ability (for example) read Microsoft Office files?

From this side-by-side Ability Office/MS Office comparison posted above, Ability Office can open "Word, RTF, ASCII, AMI Professional, [and] HTML" files, although it admits (sort of) that MS Office can open a larger array of formats.

Now perhaps Joe Random User might buy this stuff, but that won't put a dent in MS sales, other than perhaps the "Student Edition" of Office.

I don't think it's very relevant what businesses use as long as there's diversity. As far as I'm concerned, businesses can use whatever they like. What irks me is when they try to enforce their product choices on me.

The important thing here is that it introduces a lot more diversity in software, meaning that closed Microsoft-controlled formats are less likely to be considered a de-facto standard. If significant numbers of people at home aren't using Office products, it means that businesses can't as easily just send me a Word document, or require that I send a Word document to them, and blame me if I don't happen to have the software or appropriate operating system to read or produce it.

It's a shame in a way that Ability Office still claims to be compatible with Microsoft formats, meaning that it still provides space for an excuse for people to use Office formats. I guess they have to be compatible in today's world, although it's nice to see that the Word/Excel formats are only defaults as an option.

You shouldn't. Check out the screenshots http://www.ability.com/v4/newv4.php?ln=uk

It looks exactly like MS Office.

Ability Software (makers of the office suite) has a web site with a comparison to MS Office and screen shots here:

http://www.ability.com/sales/products/abvsms_tech. php?ln=us

As the article says, they're selling Ability Office - see http://www.ability.com/

Ability charge 30 quid for it (the basic version); Tesco selling it en masse for 20 seems credible. That's certainly a lot less than MS Office, but it's not the 20 vs 300 numbers that some people quote - you can get MS Office Basic (word and excel only) for around 145

It's probably not competition for Office in the workplace (where any file incompatibility sends folks into something of a tailspin), but it's solid competition for the abomination that is Works - particularly if Tesco preload it on the large number of (really pretty good quality) Acer PCs and laptops they also sell.

The office software is called Ability and will just be branded as Tesco. More information about Ability here. The website lists their entire office suite at a cost of $70 (US). The individual packages (Word processing, spreadsheet, database, paint, presentation, photo album) are available for $27.90 each. 20 Pounds = $37 so that's considerable savings. The interface is appears to be a straight clone of Microsoft's office suite. It is able to open and save to Microsoft Office formats, no idea on how well, tho.

According to: http://www.digitmag.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=62 27 the company coopertating with Tesco is FormJet. They'll distribute via http://www.tescosoftware.com/. FormJet has a Website online (a bit difficult to find from their homepage) where the products are listed: http://www.formjetplc.com/500-products.htm. They list an office suite there called "Ability Office".

The "Ability Office" website is at: http://www.ability.com/sales/products/office.php?l n=en and has a wikipedia article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ability_Office.

This is not just one of the usual OpenOffice forks.

Everytime I read a /. article about Office there is a huge Open Office vs. MS Office debate. Why does nobody mention Ability Office? http://www.ability.com/ $74.99 for the entire suite, or $59.99 if you don't want the paint application. It doesn't have 100% of Office's features, but it is pretty nice and a good alternative. Are the only choices we consider here MS or open source?

In my day we used Symantec GreatWorks. It fit on a floppy disk and only took up 4 MB of RAM. Of course, that was all the RAM we had back then, and roughly 1/20th of your hard drive. And it even had Kermit. Can MS Office do Kermit?

A modern equivalent would take up 1 GB of RAM and about 4 GB of Hard Disk Space. And it still probably wouldn't do Kermit.

Your mother in law paid cash for a copy of MS Office, yet is still using Dial-Up AOL? A standard-edition copy will fund the difference between AOL and a real internet connection for two years. Save some cash with VOIP and it pays for itself.

If you don't want to download 80 MB, try Ability Office, Abi Word, Atlantis, or the 602 suite.

Honestly, though, a real connection is worth the cash. 80MB is not that large... OO would be best served by looking into the other problems it has. After all, your mother in law did get the download fully, but she didn't like it. Let's work on making her like it.

There is also Ability office too, which at £40 is pretty decent. Loads fast, has the right features, saves/loads MS Office-compatible files, and has support and can be installed legally on all home PCs etc etc etc.

* It's used by an office suite that is free as in beer, yet there is also a commercial variant available

So is .doc for the most part. .doc is used in every office suite and other non-word processors as an export option.

* It's used as default format by different office suites (OO and KOffice, hopefully Abiword will join in a couple of years)

So .doc isn't the default but it is an exportable option in every word processor

* It's an ISO-standard (= great for government contracts)

That is the only advantage, if you can call it that. As long as the format is published, like .doc is/will be, there's not a problem. It might not be ISO-standard but it is defacto-standard.

* It's also a standard that will not change with every version. That's the biggest advantage.

You mean how Microsoft office can save as either a format compatible with 97/2000/XP or the newer 2003 format? A format that spans three versions and 5 years doesn't sound like such a big change to me.

* It's available everywhere, not just on the latest versions of Windows. It's also available on older versions of Windows, Linux, MacOSX and Solaris

MS Office is available on the two established commercial platforms - Windows and Mac OS. There are compatible office suites on avery other major platform. While they may not all be free, most are decent priced. Hancom Office, Ability Office, Corel Office, Star Office, etc.

* It's used by OO which is pretty good backwards-compatible to MSO

OOo is pretty good backwards-compatible to MSO using .doc.

Free software won't save the world. MS Windows, MS Office, and every other piece of evil software isn't going anywhere.

http://en.hancom.com/products/hancomoffice20.html
http://www.ability.com/index.php?ln=us

Soon, I expect to hear people dissing Ability because it's commercial. This is counterproductive, however - even if it's not OpenOffice, it still brings diversity, which brings tolerance. Besides, there is a Linux/WINELib port. (www.uk.ability.com isn't Slashdotted yet.)

Poking around Ability.com you will find: http://www.ability.com/linux/linuxdlsp.php?ln=us

http://www.ability.com/linux/abilitylinux.php?ln=e n
The task of porting the Ability applications fell into two parts:

1. Converting Ability's common library of Windows calls to Linux. This is actually the bulk of the work (most of which is complete) and relies heavily on a technology called Wine - see below.

2. Recompiling the actual applications. Thanks to the 1997 re-write, this turns out to be very straightforward.

The Ability applications will be native Linux code - there will be no "Windows code" that needs interpreting and Ability will not be restricted to Intel boxes. This contrasts to the Corel's Office Suite under Linux where an interpreter is used to run what is effectively, standard Windows code on Intel platforms only.

I am suprised that Sun's Star Office recieves so much attention from slashdot and the open sauce community.

Ability Office offers similar functionality in most cases, it can export to PDF, open all MS Office file types and doesn't use a ugly as hell windowing toolkit.

It can even be run on linux. Star Office is not very similar to Open Office at all, sun kept the best parts to themselves (database app) so why are they seen to be *cooler* to open source zealots then other perfectly good office sweets?

Also its cheaper than StarOffice, Ability only costs 69.95