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). A second version was released in 1998 called Ability Office 98. 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. Since then, modules have been added (an image editing module in 2000 and a presentation module in 2004) but the architecture has broadly remained the same with the step to a fully
Unicode version being made in 2008. ==OEM versions==