OK:
Before I launch into a long-winded discussion, one silly question: Have you checked in the Trash? Look and see if anything you care about is in there.
Also, please format your posts using paragraph breaks. They are much harder to read without them.
So now we know:
1) You're on 10.4.11
2) You may have been using Camino, so indeed there may have been a Mozilla plugin involved.
Is anyone out there aware of a bug with the NeoOffice plugin that would cause NeoOffice docs to disappear from the filesystem? MaeDay, where did you get that plugin, where did you install it? Typically you'd use such an extension to view documents out there on the Web in your browser. For example I have the "PDF Browser Plugin" for Camino that allows me to view PDFs in a Camino browser window (and maybe Firefox as well, I don't remember at the moment). Was this a Firefox extension? Please review the NeoOffice help system where you initially found the reference to this plugin, and tell us what it says (like where you get the plugin, etc). Did you try to view a NeoOffice document out on the Web using this browser plugin? Or did you try to view one of the files on your own local system? (I'm not sure why you'd want to do the latter, since you can easily view the docs directly in NeoOffice.)
3) One of the most common novice errors is not realizing or remembering where documents are stored. That's why I asked that.
A little bit of nomenclature: Mac OS X is a variety of Unix. In Unix each user has their own separate playground, known as their home directory. In that directory you can pretty much do as you please -- create, delete, and modify files, etc. Outside that directory users have much more limited rights to mess with stuff. Now if this is your personal Mac and there is only one user account (yours) on the machine, then that account has full administrator rights, so the previous sentence doesn't apply so much. Nonetheless OS X defaults to saving documents where it appears you have been saving them -- in the Documents folder inside your Home folder.
Nomenclature: Folders and directories are pretty much synonymous. Mac users like to call them folders, Unix calls them directories. In Unix, your "Home" directory is abbreviated with a tilde: ~. As you drill down a hierarchy of directories (folders), you separate each level with a forward slash: /. So, for example, if you had created a folder called "Letters" inside the "Documents" folder inside your Home folder, the short way of denoting that "pathway" is ~/Documents/Letters. If you had a NeoOffice document called "Letter to Jane", the path would be "~/Documents/Letters/Letter to Jane.odt" -- assuming you didn't change the file format. As you mentioned, NeoOffice allows you to create files in a variety of formats, including MS Word formats.
Now, when you open "Letter to Jane" to edit it, how does the system "know" which application to open that file with?
Unfortunately, there are two answers.
a) The "Classic" Mac OS (pre Mac OS X) used "type" and "creator" codes. Each code consisted of exactly 4 characters. For example, a document created with MS Word version 5 had a type of WDBN and a creator of MSWD. MS Word itself had a type of APPL (as in application) and a creator of MSWD. So the Mac OS would open any document with a creator code of MSWD in Microsoft Word.
b) Mac OS X still uses type and creator codes to allow for "legacy" documents and applications, but there is a preference for file extensions like those used in DOS/Windows. In DOS/Win, an extension is always the last three characters of the file name, following a dot (period). On Mac OS X the same principle applies, but the extension can be longer than 3 characters long. So in both OS X and Windows, files that end in ".doc" get opened in MS Word by default. If Word doesn't exist on the system, the system says "Help! I can't find that application! Is there something else you'd like me to try to open this document with?" And you can answer that question. That's called an "association." You're associating a file type (denoted by its extension) with an application. I don't have MS Word on my Windows box; I have OpenOffice.org instead (from which NeoOffice is derived.) So .doc files open in OpenOffice.org Writer on my system; .xls (Excel spreadsheets) open in OpenOffice.org Calc, etc. It's a little more complicated than that on OS X -- you can decide to open a particular document with a particular application, and always that application, even if the default application for that file type is something else (like Preview vs. Adobe Reader for .pdf files), but that's the basic idea.
OK, various ways to try to find your files
-- You may not have saved the documents where you thought you did. I'm assuming you thought they were going into ~/Documents. Storing as a different file type, however,
should not change the location where the file got saved. Always be aware of the location where you are saving.
--If you know any part of the file name, you should be able to search for that piece of information. Here's where things get dicey -- Between 10.3 and 10.4 the Mac OS interface for searching for files changed radically. In 10.3 you used the Find command in the Finder. In 10.4 and 10.5, you use Spotlight. And I've never used Spotlight, so I don't know what you can and can't do with it. Techie people can do a lot with it by issuing various arcane commands and search parameters but I don' t know how much is visible to the casual user.
-- If you know the file extension under which you saved the docs, you can search for that as part of the filename. The default was .odt but you said you might have used a different format without realizing it. You could try searching on that filename text, though, and see what happens.
-- I don't even know if NeoOffice uses file type and creator codes. I think a lot of newer OS X apps don't use them. If it does, and if you can figure out the document type that NeoOffice uses, then there are tools out there that will let you search using type and creator codes. The 10.3 Find command in the Finder let you do that -- if you typed Command-F you'd get a window, and in the bottom of the window you would get a set of popup menus -- perhaps only one to start with, but if you click the "+" icon you could get as many as you want. Two of the choices were Type and Creator, and therefore you could search for Type and Creator. But like I say, I don't know if NeoOffice uses type and creator, or if so, what they are. But try Command-F in 10.4 and see what happens.
The easiest thing, I think, is to search for some part of the file name that you remember of a disappeared file. Try using Command-F rather than Spotlight (if that does anything at all in Tiger; I've read that it does). Try searching for the .odt string, and maybe .doc.
You may get some help from this article -- it doesn't directly address your problems but it gives some background on using 10.4's Finder and Spotlight.
http://www.macworld.com/article/46773/2 ... tips2.htmlAmong other things, that article mentions how to "jump to" the Finder folder (directory) where you saved a file, if you somehow forgot where it was.
When you click on a search result in the Spotlight menu, the file opens in its default application. But what if you just want to see where a file is hiding, without actually opening it? Simply hover your mouse over a selection in the Spotlight menu, and a small box showing the file path will appear. To jump to the file in the Finder, select it in the Spotlight menu and press Command-return. Note that this shortcut works only in the Spotlight menu; if you have the Spotlight window open, control-click on the entry and select Reveal In Finder from the menu that appears.
Of course, that only applies if the system can find your files in the first place.
Oh, and -- having been bitten once -- from now make sure you backup
