Known limitations
What is wrong with it, written down before you find out.
This is the defect list for the version you can download today. Not a roadmap, and not a list of things we have decided not to build — those are choices, and they live on the development page. These are faults and gaps: places where the software does less than you would reasonably expect, or does it in a way that will bite you somewhere else.
A product whose whole argument is that you can check its claims cannot then keep its own defects private. Every item below names where it comes from. If one of them rules the suite out for you, that is a better outcome than finding it out after you have moved your work across.
Version 1.1.5 · last reviewed 4 October 2026
The list
19 things we know are wrong or missing.
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01
The installers are not signed, on any platform
Every build we publish is unsigned: there is no company code-signing certificate behind it yet. In practice that means macOS refuses to open the application the first time and offers to bin it, Windows stops the installer behind a full-screen SmartScreen panel, and a Linux package manager configured to demand a signature will reject the .deb and .rpm outright. Usually you can get past these, and the download page says exactly how, but not always. On a Windows 11 PC with Smart App Control switched on, or one whose SmartScreen is locked down by an employer, there is no button past the block. On some Apple silicon Macs running macOS 15 or later, people report that Open Anyway never appears for software like this, and a Terminal command is the only way in. If you still have the first 1.1.4 file for Apple silicon, CIA-NICKED-Office-1.1.4-arm64.dmg, replace it: it was not sealed even to the level macOS expects of unsigned software, so macOS may call it damaged. What you cannot do is confirm, from the operating system alone, that the file came from us — which is the thing a signature buys and a published checksum does not. Signing and notarisation are the next item on the bench.
How we know: The packaging configuration enables signing only when a certificate is present. There is not one.
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02
The Windows and Linux builds have not been run on the machines they are for
We watched the 1.1.5 build for Macs with Apple silicon open on 4 October 2026, from the disk image on the downloads page: all five editors loaded, and the assistant did a real job in each one, checked in the saved file rather than on screen. The Windows and Linux builds have not had that check. They were cross-built from the same source on a Mac, and no version of them has been launched on a Windows or a Linux machine. They are built, not tried. Everything we know about them, we know from the build succeeding, from the tests that run before packaging, and from checking that each package contains what it should, which is a weaker thing than having watched one open. If you are installing on Windows or Linux you are further out on the limb than a Mac user is, and you should hear that from us rather than find it out.
How we know: The packaged-app smoke test and the five-editor acceptance run, both against the 1.1.5 Apple silicon disk image. There is no equivalent run on Windows or Linux.
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03
Not every platform is on the same version
The newest build is 1.1.5, and today that is not what every platform gets: macOS Intel (disk image) is still on 1.1.2. That is the Intel Mac build alone, and the reason is the missing signing certificate described above rather than a forgotten rebuild — Apple silicon, Windows and Linux were all rebuilt at 1.1.5 on 4 October 2026. Until the certificate exists, an older build is missing everything released after it — the download page lists that in full rather than making you diff two changelogs.
How we know: The published artifacts themselves; the version on each is the version in the file you get.
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04
There is no Intel Mac build at the current version
The Intel Mac disk image is still 1.1.2. The packaging pipeline produces Apple silicon builds by default and only adds an Intel one when the release is being signed with a company certificate, which is the same certificate that does not exist yet. If you have a Mac from before late 2020, that is the build available to you today.
How we know: The packaging configuration keeps Intel packages behind the same certificate that gates signing.
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05
Grouped pivot fields survive our save, but not a refresh elsewhere
Group a pivot field — into months, or into ranges — and the grouping is written into the workbook and read back correctly when you reopen it here. It is stored as a private extension of our own inside the file. That keeps the file valid, and other programs ignore it. The consequence is real and worth knowing before you rely on it: open that workbook in Excel and refresh the pivot there, and the grouping falls back to the raw underlying values. The data is intact; the grouping is what you lose.
How we know: Recorded in the workbook save path, with the standard structure it does not yet write named alongside it.
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06
A pivot grouped in another program cannot be recalculated here
The same gap runs the other way. A workbook whose pivot fields were grouped by the program that created it stores that grouping in the standard structure, and we do not yet rebuild the meaning of it. Ask for a recompute and that field is reported as unsupported. It is named rather than quietly recalculated wrongly, which is the right failure of the two, but it is still a failure.
How we know: The pivot reader reports grouped fields from external files as unsupported for recompute.
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07
Retoggling an inherited slicer leaves the file's own record of it alone
Slicers created here are saved properly and rebuilt when the file is reopened — that was fixed in 1.1.0. One edge remains: if you change the selection on a slicer that came from a file somebody else made, the pivot updates and the filtered result is saved, but the selection recorded inside that file's own slicer data is left as it was. Reopen it elsewhere and the buttons can show the old selection over the new numbers.
How we know: Named as a known gap in the slicer panel itself.
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08
A pivot chart opens elsewhere as an ordinary chart
We write a chart over the pivot's output area rather than a chart the file declares as a pivot chart. It draws correctly, and its references follow the pivot when it refreshes. What is missing is the recognition: another program will not offer the field buttons that let you filter from the chart itself. Cosmetic, and a gap all the same.
How we know: The pivot-chart writer records the parts it does not yet emit and why.
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09
Exporting a PDF to a word processor is not a conversion
There is a menu item for it, and it does not convert anything. Choosing it opens a message explaining that this build cannot do it, and stops. Turning a PDF back into an editable document properly and entirely offline is a large piece of work that has not been started, and until it is decided one way or the other it is not something this suite does. We would rather the menu said so out loud than have it produce a mangled document you then have to check.
How we know: The menu action displays an explanation; there is no conversion behind it.
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10
PDF redaction removes only what is under a box, and not the file's metadata
From 1.1.5 the PDF editor can redact: you drag a box, and when you save, the text, annotations and picture pixels under it are deleted from the file rather than covered, which includes scanned pages. Two things it does not do. It removes only what sits under a box: the assistant can mark every match of a phrase for you, but on a scanned page there is no text to match until you run Recognise Text, so box those by hand and look at the list before you save. And it has not been shown to clear the file's metadata, such as its title and author fields. Check the saved file before you send it.
How we know: Tests save a redacted PDF, render the saved bytes, and check the text, annotations and picture pixels under each box are gone.
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11
Version history is Docs only, on this machine, and short
From 1.1.5 the word processor keeps earlier versions of a document you save, under File, Browse Versions. It keeps the newest 20, at most about 200 MB per document and 1 GB across all documents, so older versions fall off, oldest first. While you are saving often it keeps at most one automatic version every ten minutes. You can delete all of a document's versions from the same list. The copies live on this computer, so they do not follow the file if you email it or move it to another machine. Spreadsheets, presentations and PDFs have no version history yet.
How we know: Tests write, restore and delete real files on disk and assert the 20-version, 200 MB and 1 GB limits.
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12
Text recognition reads English only, and writes a copy
From 1.1.5 Recognise Text in the PDF editor reads scanned pages on this computer, with no internet connection, and saves a new searchable copy that opens in its own tab; your original file is left as it was. It knows English only, so other languages come out as wrong or missing text. It uses a fast, small model: a clean scan comes out nearly word-perfect, a bad photocopy noticeably less so, it has not been tested on handwriting, and it adds searchable text without rebuilding tables or columns. Pages that already have text are left alone.
How we know: Tests recognise locally generated scans, read the text in the saved PDF back, and fail if anything is fetched from the network.
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13
Spelling on Windows and Linux is English only
From 1.1.5 the word processor on Windows and Linux checks spelling offline, with suggestions on right-click. It ships two dictionaries, US and British English, and uses them only when the app's language is English: British first if your computer is set to British English, US otherwise. In any other language there is no spellchecker at all rather than one that underlines every word, and nothing is ever downloaded to fill the gap. There is no grammar checking. Review, Spelling turns it off. On a Mac the system spellchecker is used, as before.
How we know: Tests pick the dictionary for each language setting, check the bundled dictionaries are intact, and confirm the download address is empty.
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14
A PDF signed here proves the file is unchanged, not who signed it
From 1.1.5 Sign with certificate signs a copy of a PDF with a certificate you create on this computer or import from a .p12 or .pfx file. Software that checks signatures can then tell whether the file has been altered since. It cannot tell anyone who you are: a certificate made here is not vouched for by any authority that software trusts, so it shows the signer's identity as unknown, and only a certificate issued by such an authority fixes that. There is no trusted timestamp either — the signing time is this computer's clock — and no long-term validation data. It is the basic signature level, PAdES-B-B.
How we know: Tests sign a PDF, verify the signature over the saved bytes, and check that changing a single byte outside the signature makes verification fail.
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15
PDF form fields: text boxes and checkboxes only
From 1.1.5 you can add text fields and checkboxes to a PDF and save them as real form fields that other readers can fill in. That is the whole list: no radio buttons, drop-down or list boxes, signature fields, or calculated and validated fields, and no way yet to change a field's font or alignment after you place it.
How we know: Tests add fields, save, and read the form back out of the saved file, including on rotated and cropped pages.
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16
Check Style needs the assistant, and reads a paragraph at a time
From 1.1.5 Review, Check Style suggests clearer wording, sentence by sentence. It is written by the local model, so it needs AI switched on and is only as good as the model you run; it can be wrong, which is why nothing changes until you accept a suggestion. It looks at the paragraph your cursor is in, or the text you have selected, and offers at most 20 suggestions per run, so a whole document is a paragraph at a time.
How we know: Tests check which sentences are sent to the model and that an accepted rewrite keeps the surrounding formatting in the saved file.
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17
The assistant is only as capable as the model you give it
There is no model of ours behind this. The assistant is whatever you have running locally, and the quality of what it writes is that model's quality, not the suite's. One requirement is absolute rather than a matter of degree: the editors are driven through tool calls, so a model without tool support will describe the slide it would have made in perfect prose and change nothing on the page. The app probes a model before adopting one automatically and skips any that will not answer, but if you choose one yourself, this is the thing to check.
How we know: Our setup guide states the tool-calling requirement. It lives with the source; it is not yet bundled inside the application.
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18
You wait for every reply, and a bigger model means a longer wait
A model on your own machine is not a datacentre. Measured on an Apple silicon Mac Studio, mid-way through building a slide deck, a 9-billion-parameter model took about 21 seconds to start replying and a 31-billion one about 78. A ten-slide deck is roughly fifteen of those round trips. The larger model writes better prose and finishes in three times the wall-clock. Neither number is a defect exactly, but anyone arriving from a cloud assistant should see them before they form an expectation.
How we know: Measured and published in our setup guide, which lives with the source rather than inside the application.
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19
Fixes reach you only when you download them
The application does not update itself and does not check whether it could. Everything on this page that gets fixed reaches you at the moment you choose to come back and install a newer file, and not before — nothing in the software will tell you that one exists. That is the trade for a program that does not phone anywhere, and it is a real cost, not a feature with a nice name.
How we know: The start-up call that would launch an updater was removed, and no build carries an update feed.
Not a defect, not a claim
Two things we have not established.
Separate from the list above, because an unknown is not a fault. They are here so that our silence about them is not read as an answer.
How good the spelling check actually is
Two of our own internal sweeps recorded that spell check was switched off. Reading the code showed that wrong: it is on in the main document editor, and off only inside the text-box sub-editor. What nobody has yet assessed is whether it is any good — suggestions, a custom dictionary, more than one language. Until someone sits down with it, we can tell you it exists and not that it is adequate.
Anything not yet under a saved-file test
The rule we work to is that nothing is claimed on this site without a check that opens the saved document and reads the value out of it. That harness does not yet cover everything the suite can do. Where a capability is claimed on the home page it has been proved that way; where it is merely present in the application, it has not, and we are not going to imply otherwise by staying quiet about the difference.
What to do with this
Tell us when we have missed one.
This list is only as good as what we have found. If the suite does something wrong on your documents and it is not written above, that is the most useful message you can send us — hello@consultancyinaction.com. A fault we know about goes on this page whether or not it is fixed first.
Remember that fixes travel by download. Nothing here will improve on the copy you already have; you would need a newer file from the download page.
What is on the bench, and what is deliberately not being built →