Product History

Ability began life in 1985 and soon became a market-leading package, gaining over a quarter of a million registered users by the end of the decade. Its success as one of the first integrated packages for the PC was recognised as early as 1987 when it won the Barclays Bank British Micro Computing Award.

An enhanced version, named Ability Plus, was released in 1987, with further versions being released in 1992 and 1995. Ability and Ability Plus were translated into eleven languages.

In 1995, Ability for Windows was released to run on Windows 3.1. This was superseded by Ability Office 98, a 32-bit Windows 95/98/NT version released in March 1998.

The first major upgrade to this, Ability Office 2000, was released in March 2000 and included several major new features, such as a Macro programming language, a multi-sheet spreadsheet, and native support for Microsoft Access 'mdb' files in Database. This was followed in December 2001 by Ability Office 2002. Ability Office 4 - was released in August 2004 and included a presentation module for the first time, Ability Office 5, released 2008, added unicode support throughout all modules and Ability Office 6, released 2012, has support for OOXML.

Ability Office 7, released June 2017, has support for hi-resolution (4k) displays and sports a Microsoft Office 2013 style interface.

Ability Office 8, released September 2018, has support ODF import/export and Microsoft Office 2016 style interface. Ability Office 9 and 10 are based on version 8 with no additional features other than security updates.

All the way through - from Ability to Ability Plus to today's Ability Office - the same standards have been applied: our goal is to make software that is easy to use and is value for money.

Release History