NeoOffice just saved me two and half hours of work


Have you ever had Microsoft Word telling you that it can't open your file due to corruption or that it wants to save a recovered version? If so, you know the pain of rewriting and reformatting the whole file. An alternative is to ignore Word and try opening it in a different program. Often I find that NeoOffice (or OpenOffice for non-Mac users) - free to download - will open the same file without complaint. You can then resave and open in Word, or copy and paste the contents from NeoOffice into a new Word doc.

Tip: If you are experiencing problems viewing graphs and figures in Word (e.g. Word:Mac 2004) then NeoOffice and OpenOffice can help you with this as well.

Comments

  1. Actually OpenOffice.org does run on the Mac now. I prefer Go-OO though, because it is more compatible with MS stuff. Neo-Office, which is prettiest, is based on the Go-OO code I think. Great to have these choices I think.

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  2. Thanks for the comment. I probably didn't make clear the bit about OpenOffice on Mac. I was really giving the Windows and Linux guys an alternative, since NeoOffice is Mac only. NeoOffice was the first version to run natively on OS X and so I've personally kept using this although I have OpenOffice installed as well. Also - just noticed they are developing a mobile version for iPhone users.

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  3. iPhone version is great news. If they get it right, that will be terrific.

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  4. The other thing NeoOffice does is display charts and figures when Mac:Word 2004 refuses to. There can be a blank box in Word (which you can sometimes double click and opens in MS Graph or such-like) but open it in NeoOffice and there the graph is embedded in the the file as it should be.

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