Microsoft Office Faces British Invasion

jdkane writes "CNet reports that a small British software maker, Ability, plans to challenge one of Microsoft's most profitable markets by selling its low-cost package of productivity applications in North America. Ability Office faces competition from Corel's Word Perfect, Sun Microsystems' StarOffice package and OpenOffice, it's free, open-source sibling. None of these products have captured a significant share of the market from Microsoft's Office. Does anybody have any hands-on experience with the Ability Office suite, or are there any general speculations as to why this move will make a difference in the office software market (if not just for the bottom line of the software company)?"

Comments

Great

[flibble-san]

I first used Ability office a good few years ago and I found it to be very fast and use less resources than the likes of MS Office. However I feel Ability has very strong competition from the likes of OpenOffice.org, which in my personal opinion is much better and "polished" although Ability's interface is a lot better for those brought up on MS Office.

Re: Great

[g0_p]

Just downloaded it from their site.
+ Seems lighter and faster.
+ Look-and-feel is very much like Office which might huge win points with non techy people who dont want to learn a new UI.
+ It also has an export to PDF functionality.
+ Its just 14MB as compared to OO1.1 63 MB.
- Almost no standard templates. Maybe you can download them separately.
- The Spreadsheet does not seem as functional since the charting utilities seems a little too plain.
- .doc files import functionality is as bad or worse than OpenOfice. I had doc file that would be displayed totally warped on OpenOffice1.1 and this one does the same. (Its got 2-3 nested tables and stuff, I think that is what screws it up.)
+/- A lot of buttons that are usually visible in Word are not visible on this one. You could say it avoids button clutter. But that could either be because some of the functionality is not there, but the essential editing buttons are all there..

Overall I think junta might take towards it because it has a look-and-feel that is not very different from M$Office. Though functionality wise , and polish wise OO1.1 is WAY better. (I love the new uncluttered OO1.1 UI.)

I tried it a while ago

[keesh]

I tried a free trial of it a while ago (came on the front of a magazine). It was usable, but not as good as OpenOffice. Unfortunately, after installing it, I was unable to print anything from any application, and opening Control Panel would cause a system crash. It seems that the program was installing dodgy system controls. Hopefully that's fixed now... I'm MS-free now, though, so I guess I'll never know...

Reviewed by PCW UK

[Mwongozi]

You can read a (very favourable) review of Ability Office here. In their monthly "best buys" guide, they actually rated it above Microsoft Office 2002.

Wv : OpenSource Word File Library

[Anonymous Coward]

http://wvware.sourceforge.net/

This an open source library for Reading and writing .doc formats. It is used both by Abiword and Kword. Try it today, and in the unlikely event one of your documents dosen't import, You can report it so the library can improve.

The biggest task in breaking the Office monopoly is the file formats, so help break it.

Another company making an Office clone

[GRH]

A German company called Softmaker is also working on an Office compatible suite. They have the word-processor done at this point (TextMaker). The benefit for a lot of us is that there are Windows/Linux/FreeBSD(!) versions.

I had never heard of them either, but I gave the free trial a spin, and it's a heck of a lot faster than OO. The Word import capability isn't quite as good as OO, but it's more than acceptable for most docs (and being improved).

I'm not connected to the company in any way, but I am a customer of the Linux version.

GRH

Here are the forms, etc.

[Decaff]

Forms, mail merges, standard letters are all there under the AutoPilot.

Open the data navigator and you have tables and queries including QBE grids just like in Access. Reports are now present in OO 1.1.

Users with ZERO training and no experience of Access would find equal problems getting things going. I would suggest that users with zero training should not be doing table design, queries or reports. I know from bitter experience that the results of allowing this are frequently an unmanageable mess.

OO *is* ready to replace MS - I have used it for exactly this in commercial organisations.

Re:I'm a die-hard OpenOffice user

[Spoing]

One of the benefits that Microsoft gets by being the market leader is that software is written for it. StarOffice/OpenOffice has a large hurdle to overcome there.

On that note, the StarOffice and OpenOffice SDK now has support for Python development.

StarOffice and OpenOffice also support StarBASIC (built-in VBA syntax compatible), C++, Java, as well as Python.

Adding Python, though, has shown that the base API needs to be cleaned up to make it simpler. I expect interesting things to happen on this end between now and the next release, though it's usable right now.