Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Neo Office

danHdelion

danHdelion

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 6, 2017
1
0
Hi There,

I have been using Neo Office for about a year, since finally abandoning MS Office on my Macbook.

Recently I've been experiencing some horrible bugs that I cannot find solutions to myself or online. As I often share documents with multiple parties, I often have to save them as .docx. Several times recently, tonight being one of these, I've reopened the save document to find loads of my work disappeared...or rather, invisible.

- Where there were images are now giant arrows.
- All text in tables has vanished
- Bullet points are there, but no text next to them!

Saving as a .odt file does not seem to make the missing work reappear. Opening in Open Office makes no difference.

But, BIZARRELY, if I open it with Preview, I can see most of the text and images perfectly fine (though formatting is a bit odd of course)! Same in Text Edit, where I can see all the text, though not images of course.

This wasn't happening when Neo Office (2015) was first installed, and don't know why it seems to have degraded. Given the content is clearly still there (according to Preview) the difficulty seems to be displaying it.

Example images attached below. Can anybody tell me what the **** is going on?? It's driving me away from Open Office programmes all together.

Cheers,
Dan
Screen-Shot-2017-07-06-at-22.47.41.png

Screen-Shot-2017-07-06-at-22.48.05.png

Screen-Shot-2017-07-06-at-22.47.16.png
 
I didn't use Neo Office for a long time and haven't seen something like that. Even though some thoughts.

Did you try LibreOffice and especially Pages to open the file and save it from there?

At least in LibreOffice there are preferences for assigning the amount of memory (large files), OpenCL settings (rendering problems) and loading/saving (Microsoft compatibility).

If that will always happen, if the file was edited on a specific platform/software, it could be that docx is too advanced on the editor's system (MS office more recent than 2007) and has some XML-tags that Neo Office and other third party software can't interpret. I had a similar case with xlsx files. For better compatibility (especially color formatting) I switched over to the older xls, maybe in your case, doc is a better exchanging format as docx, too.

The advantage of docx over doc is its accessible document structure. As it's some kind of zip-file, you should be able to take a look inside the XML with some decompression tool (I use StuffIt Archive Manager for such things, similar to The Archive Browser).

First make a backup of the documents, then compare it to a working file (e.g. the version before the error happened). Maybe it turns out, that it's just the folder structure inside the docx that got somehow mangled or you could find some unexpected tags inside the XML documents or images are saved in an unusual file format. Could also be a character or text encoding failure (like line break CR/LF). If you find the reason, you could probably write a conversion script that corrects the issue or find a script or plugin that already might exist like this one for zoho/google docs.

Whatever the reason for the incompatibility is, as a last resort without fiddling too much with technical stuff, you could use the exact same software that the last editor runs (e.g. in a virtual machine), open the file and try to find a workflow that exports it read- and editable to Neo Office.
 
Last edited:
eclipse said:
I'd switch to LibreOffice as it has a mac native build.
Click to expand...
Yes, I agree that it is time for the OP to switch over.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice have had a native build for many years. Where NeoOffice carved out a niche for itself is that it was to be an "optimized" native build.

Developers of LibreOffice used standard APIs to ensure that the OSX version of LO worked consistently with the version for other OSes. The Neo team took the code and tweaked some elements to make use of some OSX-specific elements.

Theoretically, that should have resulted in a version of LO that ran better on OSX. But because the Neo team is small and is getting their source from the LO source tree, they lag behind what LO offers.
 
Office is a paid for app, and if not careful, a subscription app. There is little competition these days for office style applications where I remember the time of WordPerfect, Office, and other word processing applications. No, I didn't care for WordPerfect, especially after having to support it and its funky way of handling things. But competition is healthy and that is what is missing. On the Windows side I have so many issues with bugs, hangs, and other issues that it gets in the way of doing work.
 
Yes it's a paid for app, but costs around the same as an apple music subscription, or 2 coffees at starbucks, a beer, a DVD or a cheap app on the app store.

Absolute bargain for the features and functions it provides to me and has been completely bug or crash free.
I get more OSX and iOS failures vs office. You also have the ability to use the free pages stuff apple ships as part of a device.
 
Microsoft Word was nearly perfect at Word for Windows v2.0. That was so long ago. Since then, between bloat and bugs it has degraded from neglect and feature creep IMHO. Heck the version of Windows for OS X when OS X was 10.4 (aka Tiger) is better than what I see now out of Word. My wife is a heavy user and while she owns the latest full purchased package, still uses 2008 because the latest crashes and takes her work with it. :(
 
In my experience with various packages over the years, these things (disappearing images/tables) happen because each app uses different ways to present the information. Microsoft used to use different imaging formats in Word for PC vs Word for Mac. As such, copying an image and pasting into Word, then circulating among many others (Mac and PCs) came back with less-than-optimal results. I tried various work-arounds (such as pasting only png or jpeg formats), which would usually work until the next major release. Note that I work in a large corporation with thousands of Macs and PCs running the latest Office, and we still run into issues when circulating a doc. I'm not sure how open apps, such as Neo/Libre/iWork can possible keep up, especially since there are different command codes in the document formatting.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back