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.)

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.