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 This was superseded by Ability Office 98, a 32-bit Windows 95/98/NT version released in March 1998.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 Access 'mdb' files in Database. This was followed in December 2001 by Ability Office 2002.
A major new release - Ability Office Professional v4 - was released in August 2004 and includes a Presentation module for the first time.
Ability Office 5, released summer 2008, has unicode support throughout all modules.
All the way through - from Ability to Ability Plus to today's Ability Office - the same standards have been applied: to use the best available current technology to produce the best quality product at the best value price. The story goes on ...
Release History
| Product | First Released | Most Recent Update |
|---|---|---|
| Ability Office version 5 | 2008 | July 2008 |
| Ability Office version 4 | 2004 | March 2007 |
| Ability Office 2002 | 2002 | Dec 2003 |
| Ability Office 2000 | 2000 | March 2001 |
| Ability Office 98 | 1998 | Nov 1999 |
| Ability for Windows 1.5 | 1995 | Sept 1996 |
| Ability Plus 3.0 | 1995 | June 1997 |
| Ability Plus 2.0 | 1992 | Jan 1997 |
| Ability Plus 1.0 | 1987 | April 1991 |
| Ability 1.2 | 1985 | July 1987 |