NeoOffice 4+

At first I was overjoyed to find a replacement for MS Word (Since I am something of a paranoid that wants to resist the power of evil, multi-national megacorporations ;).

First, the good: NeoOffice mirrors the hotkeys and other stuff from MS Word commendably. It's really easy to get hang of and most of the menu stuff are laid out better than in Word or OpenOffice. And that's great.

Too bad, NeoOffice is riddled with bugs to the point of being unusable. I waited for the last update to see if any of these were remedied, but sadly, they were not. So, without further ado, here is the list of the NeoOffice flaws that have made me pretty angry for nearly six months now:

Bug 1:
- After opening a .doc file, trying to search (ctrl+F) or save makes the document freeze for nearly two minutes, every time. There's just the beach ball spinning for all that time, everything else is frozen. (Move to .odt, you say? Not an option. I have to regularly access my files on some antiquated computers still running XP and Word from the medieval times).

Bug 2:
- After updating OSX to Mavericks 10.9 from 10.8, NeoOffice tries to open a folder called "user" 4 times upon the startup. Then, after clicking "cancel" for 4 times ("open" won't do anything), NeoOffice tries to open a folder called "images". This time only 3 clicks are required before NeoOffice is happy.
However, after that, NeoOffice tries to open "autocorr" 2 times. Then (if you're lucky and the program won't crash), you are ready to edit your document. However, at the instant you misspell, NeoOffice tries again to open "autocorr" folder 2 times. Every time.

Bug 3:
- Open a .docx file. Then edit it for, say 15 minutes. Then try to save it with the same name. It won't happen. You get a "general I/O error" instead. Actually, any amount of editing will do it, you just cannot overwrite the old .docx file. You have to save it to .odt /.doc/something else, erase the old file, then re-save the file as a .docx in case you want to keep the file as .docx for, say, compatibility's sake.

Bug 4:
- Random crashes. I would very much like to be more specific about what is causing these. But I can't. NeoOffice just seems to crash after an hour or so of editing with no discernible pattern of what led to the crash. Your Mileage Might Vary.

Bug 5:
- After a crash, NeoOffice either tries to start itself or you have to click the icon to make it start. Well, the dock icon bounces happily a couple of times, indicating the software is starting, but actually it's not. NeoOffice is just fooling you. It loves your attention and wants some more. You have to click the icon again to make it really start.

Bug 6:
- When NeoOffice has finally started after this double-start gimmick, it usually gives you the option to salvage the file that hadn't been properly saved before the crash. The salvaging seems to usually work, points for that. However, NeoOffice not only opens the actual file, but also a read-only copy of it, and the read-only copy always stays on the front.
So most of the time you start editing the read-only one and only after 5 minutes you (maybe) notice that you aren't able to save your changes and, since you won't remember exactly what changes you've made, you have to copy-paste the whole document to the other window - which can be pretty unnerving when you're working on a 210 page manuscript. Or, you can open a new window, copy-paste the whole text there, save it to a new file, close everything, rename the new file as the original file.
Which, needless to say, is annoying, pointless, and downright stupid.

Bug 7:
- (This is more a bug in the head of whoever is running the NeoOffice website…) I bought NeoOffice software from the App Store, paying good money for it. As a software developer myself, I can really appreciate the value of bug reports and feedback from users. Luckily, there's a forum on the website in which I could have posted these findings of mine… oh, but no!
You see, first of all, the forum is limited to users that have paid for the software – paid for it on the website's store, that is. They don't recognize my purchase on the App Store, meaning I am unable to give them feedback and bug reports on their own site! Great customer support, folks.

I would very much like to be able to rid myself of Microsoft products completely by using alternative software, but at least in the case of serious text editing I am forced to go back to Word. OpenOffice is a nightmare to use on OSX and NeoOffice's bugs make it unreliable and unpleasant to use.

Despite the documentation saying otherwise, language packs for foreign languages (for example Finnish) seem to be missing from the download - and you can’t install your own. And there is no support for users available. So, no hyphenation, which makes the program very close to unusable. Pity, as it seems otherwise promising.