I received a WORD doc on email. Opened it in pages, no problem. Save it locally to my Mac's hard drive, no problem. But if I try to edit the doc and then save the new version, I get an error message saying the doc cannot be autosaved.
Why are such simple things so hard when all of Apple's advertising is that hard things are made easy!!??
Pages version 7.3 (5989)
Mac Book Pro running OS 10.14.3
MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.14
OK, Update.
I spent 30 minutes on with the helpdesk. They had no idea what happened or why. We went step by step through my process: open the Word file from the email I received, no problem. My mac translates the file to a .pages format, no problem. Save the file on my hard drive as a .pages file, no problem. Then open the file again, edit it and try to save the updated file... Cannot. 'This doc could not be autosaved'.
Help desk guy said that 'something' happened when opening the file whereby even though your hard drive showed you that you had saved a .pages file, it hadn't actually correctly translated the file into a .pages file. Hence you can save it once but not a second time. This makes absolute zero sense to me.
Work around we found: instead of directly opening the word file from the email, download it to your download folder first. Then open it. Then copy paste all the edits you made on the file from the other day into this new version of the file. (i lost all the formatting, headers and footers but nothing I can do about it). Then save it. It works.
With both methods I end up with a .pages files but in the second method you can edit/save the file, in the first you can't. Helpdesk guy didn't know why.
Yay Apple. Such great software.
OK, Update.
I spent 30 minutes on with the helpdesk. They had no idea what happened or why. We went step by step through my process: open the Word file from the email I received, no problem. My mac translates the file to a .pages format, no problem. Save the file on my hard drive as a .pages file, no problem. Then open the file again, edit it and try to save the updated file... Cannot. 'This doc could not be autosaved'.
Help desk guy said that 'something' happened when opening the file whereby even though your hard drive showed you that you had saved a .pages file, it hadn't actually correctly translated the file into a .pages file. Hence you can save it once but not a second time. This makes absolute zero sense to me.
Work around we found: instead of directly opening the word file from the email, download it to your download folder first. Then open it. Then copy paste all the edits you made on the file from the other day into this new version of the file. (i lost all the formatting, headers and footers but nothing I can do about it). Then save it. It works.
With both methods I end up with a .pages files but in the second method you can edit/save the file, in the first you can't. Helpdesk guy didn't know why.
Yay Apple. Such great software.
You can open a Word .doc/.docx in Pages v7.3, and Pages will translate it into its own internal .pages document format. The original Word document remains unchanged, uneditable, and unsaveable. You save the translated Pages content, and if you want that back in Word format, it must undergo another translation (export) from the internal .pages content back to Word.
Pages v7.3 is not a Word clone. If you want to open/edit/save Word documents in their native document format, you need Office 2016/2019 for Mac, and not Pages.
Apple does not guarantee the accuracy of any document translation to or from Pages, and both Word and Pages have mutually exclusive features that do not translate at all.
Thank you very much for your reply VikingOSX.
But who said anything about wanting the document back in Word format? I don't want it back in Word format. I do not want to open/edit/save Word documents in their native document format.
I opened the Word doc and save it as a .pages file on my hard drive.
But after I edit the doc, I now CANNOT save it.
Do you know why??
Since Apple released Pages v5 in Oct. 2013, there have been intermittent reports of this save issue. When you inititally saved that translated Word content as a .pages document, you did not mention exactly where you saved it.
I sent myself a 197 page .docx from one email account to another. On my 4GB MacBook Air, I selected the mail attachment and opened it in Pages v7.3 on macOS 10.14.3. I clicked save, and got the expected dialog, and chose to Cancel. When I selected Save again, Pages didn't hesitate to freeze. It essentially froze the entire Mac as Force Quit was inoperable as well as the Dock. I held the power key down and got the Shutdown panel, and even that could not be selected. This is the first time I have had this issue with Mojave, or Pages on this Mac. I also do not normally open Mail attachments in another application, but rather save them to disk first, before proceeding.
I repeated the steps in the second paragraph after a Safe Boot, and normal reboot. Both a save, and an unnecessary, second manual save after an edit worked fine without drama. In Pages, after the first save operation, auto-save is enabled for additional changes — unless measures are taken in System Preferences : General to suppress auto-save functionality. All this time, the Mail application was still open.
So, I am unable to repeat your second save issue here. Based on my own experiences, I cannot recommend the workflow of opening Mail attachments in Pages without first saving those attachments to local storage.
That's absolutely right, instead of double-clicking the Word file from the email to open it straight in pages, I had to right click the file, download it and then open it from the downloaded location. After that I was able to edit/save the doc.
The annoying and confusing part is that when I simply double clicked the file to open it in pages, I was still able to do an initial save in a .pages format. But the helpdesk guy said even though it LOOKS LIKE it has translated into a .pages format, it hasn't really/correctly done so; hence subsequent edits/saves are not possible.
Oh well, several hours of yesterday and today wasted for such a little thing but it works now.
I very much appreciate you taking the time to reply/help.
Cannot save Pages documents
