Mojave Preview - No permission to Move a pdf file

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Level 1

27 points

Mojave Preview - No permission to Move a pdf file

When I open a pdf from my Outlook mail, it opens in Preview, with a default Outlook Temp folder address. When I try to Move the pdf to the folder I actually want to save it in, I get the message, "The document could not be saved as____. You don't have permission." And yet when I open Get Info it says I have full permission to Read and Write.

I talked to Apple Tech Support and they said that when a file is opened in Preview it hasn't really been saved anywhere, so you can't move it (?!?) which is more than a little stupid.

So now I have to Duplicate it and save the duplicate, which is two steps instead of the one it used to be when we still had "Save As" in Preview (sigh) - and still is for most documents.

Is there any more efficient way around this MacOS idiosyncrasy?

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Jan 21, 2020 2:07 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 21, 2020 2:21 PM in response to LKHill

Does not Outlook offer a secondary menu item that provides options such as using Quick Look on that PDF, or actually saving the PDF from Outlook directly to the chosen filesystem location? I would not recommend opening an email attachment in Preview, and attempt to change what is just a temporary file — until you directly save it from Outlook to a real filesystem location — not a temporary (e.g. $TMPDIR) location.

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Answer 2

LKHill Author

Level 1

27 points

Jan 22, 2020 6:28 AM in response to VikingOSX

Literally for 40 years on the Mac (including 3 years working for Apple) I've been double-clicking on files in emails in order to view them in their appropriate app and then save them to a folder. It works just fine for all the MS Office apps. Why not Preview?

This whole foolishness with Preview started when they took away the "Save As" function, I suppose because technically it wasn't yet saved? But as a user, I don't really care about the technical aspects. I just want to open a document with a double-click, and save it easily, without multiple steps. I can't do that today with pdf's that automatically open in Preview from an email app.

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