A brand name that has had a shoehorn into the low-cost office suite market for many years, Ability has been pushed a little to the sidelines by the OpenOffice.org movement in recent times, but that shouldn't blind you to the fact that it still produces some quite smart software.

Ability Office Business is a tailored office suite for - as you'd probably guessed - the business market, and with an asking price of £34.99 you get a lot of applications per seat for the outlay. The Business edition includes a word processor (Write), a spreadsheet (sensibly called Spreadsheet), the self-explanatory Database and Presentation (that's the PowerPoint rival), along with tools you won't find equivalents for in Microsoft Office, namely Photopaint, Draw and Photoalbum.

There's nothing particularly revolutionary about any of these applications, but then they've hardly been designed with innovation in mind. Instead, particularly where the main word processing and spreadsheet applications are concerned, the aim of the game has been to mirror as much of the core functionality of the more expensive Microsoft alternatives as possible.

And Ability, as it always has done, manages this well. It's made little effort to catch up with Office 2007, but instead focuses on the slightly older look and feel editions of Microsoft's applications, and ably offers good alternatives. They're ideal for the stereotypical user who falls in the bracket of the 80 percent who use 20 percent of the functionality of Microsoft Office, as it's only when attempting more advanced tasks that Ability struggles to measure up. That's with the exception of Database, which is really no match for the power of Access.

Crucially - and we suspect that this is where Ability focuses much of its energy - cross-compatibility with the likes of Word and Excel is good. Granted, our macro-driven test spreadsheet wasn't a success, but a formula-laden Excel document did translate across to Spreadsheet well enough, and a variety of Word documents survived the journey to Write with reasonable ease.

Furthermore, each of the applications boasts an interface that's familiar in feel and use to the Microsoft equivalent, and in an office environment where support calls need to be minimised, that's quite a help. Bonus points too for native PDF support.

Yet there are further bonuses, in the trio of graphics applications. Of the three, Photopaint in particular is an underrated photo and image editing application that's surprisingly straightforward to use. It won't give Photoshop nightmares, but it certainly handled core photo editing needs with no bluster.

All in all this is a solid, mature office suite with one or two welcome features of its own.

Ability Office Business is a good, solid suite of applications that undoubtedly offers good value. The fact that there is a charge - unlike OpenOffice - does mean that support is available, and while it's not a perfect replacement for a Microsoft Office suite, the huge potential cost savings may well be endearing enough.