pages file is missing its index.xml file?

It's very frustrating. They have ruined Pages, Mail, Calendar, and other software than I used on a daily basis. I am a professional editor and when I opened their "new and improved" version of Pages and couldn't even see a page or word count on the screen, I had to stop using it. Apparently they thought that people would only be using these things on their phones for emoji filled fun, and they threw all the millions of lifelong professional users into the trash as being not worthy of Apple's time and attention. I actually had to go out and buy freaking MS Office, which I hate because Pages was a much better program. I go to Apple's feedback page at least once a week and harangue them about Pages, Mail and Calendar. I urge others who have had their workflow system ruined by these ridiculous software changes to do the same. We don't want baby-ware, we need fully functional professional programs.

i too run a professional business along with my life on Mac and I just told them (albeit very reluctantly and with lots of love) that I was breaking up with Mac software and migrating my calendar, mail, contacts, image handling, word editing and other mission critical items to some other (large cloud based?) third party. perhaps MS office with the addition of MSAccess may help in this transition?

the bummer is that any third party vendors that plug into Mac software are items I can no longer consider buying.

perhaps I will start a conversion thread based upon my specific needs and post a link here so those that are creating a parallel setup to assist the Mac functionality in this area can help each other out...

i am obviously not abandoning these Mac software but as a professional it wold be derelict of me not to start working with parallel or added functionality...

I haven't used Access for a long time, but I did end up getting MS Office 365 so I could actually get some work done. I think there is a huge opportunity for someone to come up with a working suite that blows both the MS and Apple systems away.

I'm still hoping Apple will fix the problems with Mail -- I have a dozen email accounts, most of which are web admins for various clients, and now they ALL appear in one shared InBox, it drives me absolutely insane. I used Bento as my contact database for years and either Filemaker killed it or Apple killed it when they bought Filemaker. And even though I owned an earlier Filemaker license AND a separately purchased Bento license, they want me to pay full price for another Filemaker license. I told them to stuff it.

Their decision to break up calendar into separate apps was one of the stupidest moves ever. Calendar. Tasks. Notes. Reminders. Ridiculous. Why would they make a perfectly good system less efficient? It makes the whole system too annoying to use. I remember when Jobs marched back into a company that had so many different offerings they didn't even know what they were selling, and clients didn't know what to buy. He said "We are throwing out all this crap. We need to offer one professional desktop and one professional laptop; one home desktop and one home laptop. That's it." That's what brought this company back from disaster -- focus, simplicity. Now they are breaking things up that shouldn't be broken up, and simplifying the things that actually need to offer complex functions. I have tremendous respect for Cook, but it broke my heart to get up one morning and not be able to do any work for my clients for three days because Apple ruined its own software. That's not the kind of betrayal I ever expected to encounter from Apple.

What kind of word processor doesn't even tell you the word count? The page count? Even if you are not going to a printed document, you still need to know the word count. What if you're a grant writer and you need to meet exact specifications, like describing a complex process in only 100 words? You need to see the exact word count on the screen as you type and work out the ideas. That one thing alone killed Pages for me. As an editor and writer I cannot work without a live, on-screen word count.

Argh! OK, that's enough of a rant. I should get back to work! -Karen

You are not talking to Apple here. Just rambling on to us international volunteers about your various Apple product experiences — that are not problems that can be fixed in this support community. Use Apple's Feedback site to communicate directly to the Apple Product teams.

We know. Please ignore us while we converse among ourselves. I go to the feedback side constantly.

hi karen

thanks for some very helpful information. I know you and others sometimes call these rants but I would like to come up with another term as I find them extremely helpful expositions of /factual/ information related to what does and does not work for some users.

in my case it will help prevent me going down a rabbit hole - which I didn't have time to explore in the first place - and hopefully lead to 'productive non-wage earning hours' that get me set up with a (new) methodology that works. then I can go back to work and start being productive again instead of constantly troubleshooting (or worse yet forgetting what kind of functionality I am missing or doing repetitive tasks that waste time and wrists).

definitely all ears for those that have hard earned experience.

some items I am looking at in parallel to Mac apps to increase my productivity:

google business apps

filemaker

daylite

MS Office (need to find out if I should buy access and what mac software it will "plug into").

thunderbird

Hey I just wanted to give a solution because I had the same issue.

I ended up calling apple support.

They had me shut down the computer and restart in safe mode.

You do this by holding down shift and then starting the computer. when you see the apple let go of shift.

The computer will be really slow..

After it opens then reopen the document. Mine opened and seemed to work ok but slow. We closed and opened it a few times then shut down the computer again.

Restart the computer and although it was really slow I was able to open the document.

Safe mode healed the document on its own.

Hope this helps!

"Safe mode healed the document on its own."

There was nothing wrong with the document.

The document was last handled and saved by the current version of Numbers (or Pages, for Pages documents exhibiting the same issue), and, when the error was reported, was in the midst of an attempt to open it in Numbers (or Pages '09.

Nubers 09 and Pages '09 documents are packages, containing, among other files, the 'missing' index.xml file reported missing. Numbers 3.x files (and Pages 5.x files) use a different file structure which does not include an index.xml file.

The solution is to open the file using the current version of Numbers (or Pages, for Pages documents). If you then want to use that file in Numbers '09 (Pages '09), all that's needed is to Export the file from Numbers 3.x (or from Pages 5.x) to a file in the format used by the previous version.

Regards,

Barry

"Apple Support"?

Sounds best avoided. You may as well have waved a rabbits foot at your screen.

THere was no need to restart in safe mode for a document simply opened in the wrong App.

Peter

This has suddenly started happening to me too.

I have discovered that if you single click on the file, then go to File>open with>Pages 5.6.2, the file opens OK...

But what the heck is going on Apple?

Apple has really gone rotten on us. Never again. As soon As my phone contract is "Up" I am going back to Linix and Droid. The scary world of Micrsoft Viruses and all. Actually my Mackbook has been under attack the last two and a half years as well.

I really loved the stability and efficiency of my Silver O8 Mackbook. The included software OS X 10.5 "Leopard". Everything worked fine and flawlessly. Trouble started when I was asked to upgrade my I tunes.....It stopped working correctly. It began constantly telling me a newer version was available and could not open. Naturally I avoided "Snow Leopard", OS X.6 as long as possible. When I finally updated late in 2013 it went on smooth no problems. By I was having problems with internet speed and all file loading. I succumbed and loaded OS X 10.11.6 "El Capitan" and it has been a huge problem. Photos are all loused up, and the Pages chatastrophe "Missing required.XML". Really Apple? This is how you are going to ride your fancy new "Spaceship"?. Get loused.

Hey Bajer...!!!! Thanks for the work around on the Missing Index.XML Pages issue.

"Just click on the file and use open with Pages 5.6.2". I am doing that succefully.

You are the man, (woman?) Bajer

Thanks alot.

thank you, this really helped

Hallelujah!!! Thank you:::))) I've been fighting with this for a couple weeks!

Awesome! thanks for the information. The steps fixed our issue right away. We did a Control + Click on document and chose 'Open With' Pages [newest version]