Ability Office is an office suite developed by Ability Plus Software and distributed and marketed by Ability Software International and which consists of a word processor, spreadsheet, database, modules for presentation and photo or image editing, plus a photo/image organiser and vector line drawing application.
In the same way, the photo and image editing application will create, load from and save to Adobe Photoshop (*.psd) file formats, together with other mainstream graphical file types.
Development began in 1992 following a decision to replace Ability Plus, an existing DOS-based integrated package, and a first release was made in 1995 called Ability for Windows and consisted of modules for word processing, spreadsheet, database and communications (a terminal program).
The framework for the entire suite was changed from Borland OWL to Microsoft MFC resulting in better performance and the database was re-written to use the Jet Database Engine.
New version 8, released September 2018, includes Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Database, Photo-editor, has a Microsoft Office 2016 style interface, is compatible with Windows 10 and all Windows versions back to XP, supports ODF import/export, allows switching interfaces between traditional toolbar mode and ribbon style, supports for 4k/hi-res displays, supports OOXML import/export — native support for docx, xlsx, pptx, and is free for personal (non-commercial) use.