Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
I have a spreadsheet that I have been working with for months now. Suddenly Numbers tells me I can't save the file after making changes to it. What is happening. I am a former PC user and while I absolutely love my Mac and wouldn't go back, I must say Numbers and Pages have been a huge disappointment.
What is the message you see when you try to save? Is the file locked? Has it been moved while it is open? Is it in the trash (accidentally)? We will need more information to be able to help.
Select save as instead
The document "Expenditure 2011" could not be saved. You do not have permission. The file isn't locked and hasn't been moved. Also isn't in the trash.
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried that with no luck. Also tried saving it with a different file name and no luck.
how about copy/paste to a new spreadsheet and saving that?
You may also want to boot to you OS X CD and run Disk utilities and repair permissions. Here is a good overview of how to repair permissions.
http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=3810
Wayne
If the OP reboots his computer the spreadsheet he is trying to save will be lost!
That is true. OP should try the idea you had to copy the contents out of the current spreadsheet then try to repair permissions.
I haven't really used the Apple community before, and I have to say I am very impressed with how willing people are to help and how quickly I got responses.
I guess I will have to go the "repair permissions" route. Unfortunately, the spreadsheet is quite large (10 pages/sheets). So I am still feeling bitter about the software itself. Any idea why this happened in the first place?
Would you recommend switching to MS Office for Mac?
The only reason I would personally use Excel is for very large number sets. Other than that I like Numbers.
Idonthavetimeforthis wrote:
I haven't really used the Apple community before, and I have to say I am very impressed with how willing people are to help and how quickly I got responses.
I guess I will have to go the "repair permissions" route. Unfortunately, the spreadsheet is quite large (10 pages/sheets). So I am still feeling bitter about the software itself. Any idea why this happened in the first place?
Would you recommend switching to MS Office for Mac?
Excel is a truly excellent 🙂 program, the rest of Office less so, you'd have to choose, I grew up in Excel and still find Numbers rather limiting, but ...
In Pages Numbers do you have the option to 'move or copy' spreadsheets to another file (in Excel the option appears when you rightclick one of the sheet tabs at the bottom of the page) I am no Numbers expert so someone else may chime in on this. But assuming you do copy the whole thing to a new workbook and save that.
I went into Finder/Get Info/Permissions. It should that I had permission to read and write to the file, contrary to the error message I got. None-the-less, I set the permissions to everyone and then saving the file worked????
So something strange happened to the permissions. Which I am still baffled about. Makes me really question the integrity of Numbers.
Thanks again for your helpful suggestions.
Not sure that it is Numbers that did this, why not repair permissions from Disk Utility.
I have to say I agree with you in terms of Numbers being limiting. Simple things like being able to create hyperlinks between sheets within a work book isn't available in Numbers. I must say I was surprised that Apple didn't produce a better product in this arena, when everything else they do seems to work pretty seamlessly.
Thanks again for your help.
Good point. Now that I have been able to save the file. I will run the repair permissions.
I opened the backup of this file on time machine last night to ensure that the latest changes I had made were backed up. Could that have somehow messed up the permissions?
Why won't numbers let me save my spreadsheet?????
