What happened to Save As?

Taking away "Save As" is the stupidest idea anyone has ever come up with.

See my instructions in this thread to return Save As to its normal behavior. Note that it requires Mountain Lion. You can't do any of this in Lion.

PeePee Sprinkles wrote:

What was completely erroneous? I will admit I was wrong, I just need to know with which statement. Nice attempt at flaming, I tend to hide in forums posting when I need to get my work done.

I have no interest in flaming anyone. My posts have been a very sincere reaction to both the content and the tenor of yours.

Also, I posted I have 10.7, not 10.8.

Perhaps you'll tone done the arrogance a pinch when you realize that you did no such thing, at any time, in this thread. This, of course, makes all the difference in the world in answering your question — as I clearly explained in my first reply to your post (and you apparently ignored).

In fact, it's more than apparent. I even asked you directly for a clarification of your statements...but none was forthcoming.

Ready for your first admission of error now?

And stop being a Linux queen ans calling them animal names, when users use "About This Mac", they are given a version number, not a meme.

For someone who paints himself as so experienced in the ways of discussion boards, I'm surprised you're unaware that you don't get to tell us what to do here. We'll use whatever terminology we deem appropriate. If you don't like it, you're more than welcome to impose your charming personality on another thread.

By the way, what is a "Linux queen ans"? Could this be another occasion to admit an error?

Pay me and I'll upgrade, but an upgrade and hodling a key down is not the solution folks are looking for.

Time for admission of error #3?

And I'm glad you're so all-knowing that you can speak for every Macinosh user on the planet with such confidence. You're not speaking for me. Personally, while I devoutly wish the entire Save As debacle had never happened in the first place, I'm figuring right now that the Option key fix in Mountain Lion is as good as it's gonna get.

It took a very long time and a lot of gnashing of teeth before it was finally offered. Many in this thread and elsewhere told us it would never happen, and that we were wasting our time complaining about it.

We proved them wrong, and while the Option key fix may not be the perfect solution, it is a solution.

Furthermore, if (when debating the need for Auto Save) I lambasted those too lazy to key Command-S every once in a while, I can hardly moan about holding down the Option key from time to time to accomplish what I need to.

BTW, I picked this stupid name bacause Apple wouldn't accept the myriad of obviously-unique usernames when I set this up.

A pity you didn't try just a little bit harder. As I intimated, it's a little hard to take anything you say seriously with a screen name like that.

When I hold down "option", I feel the same anger.

I would like to gently suggest that you do have some anger management issues you might want to work on.

DChord568 wrote:

Badunit wrote:

Just so everyone is aware without having to read through the many many pages of this thread, the new "Save As" is NOT the same as the old "Save As".

In the past, if you used "Save As', it created a new document with the changes you just made. The original document was not altered.

With the new "Save As", it creates a new document and switches you over to it but it also saves to the original document any changes you made up to that point. BIG DIFFERENCE.

There's a lot of confusion over this. I don't believe what you're saying here is strictly true.

I would be interested in the results of any tests you guys would like to conduct.

I just tested, posted slightly before you did, see my post here

As far as I can see Save as is exactly the same as it was.

Hi Donnie,

I may have already pointed you to this, but see my notes here to see how to get Mountain Lion's Save As… to behave almost exactly like Snow Leopard. The only real difference is that Autosave/Versions is still running in the background for those apps that use it. But files will no longer be saved without your consent when you close them, and a Save As… actually will save your changes only to the new document, not the one you were working from.

It's the only way I'll use Mountain Lion. Hopefully, we'll be able to do the same type of thing in Mavericks, 10.9.

except for some strange issues with color saturation in the finder.

That's a known bug which affects only some model Macs. I've narrowed it down to where it happens and have filed a bug report. I got it in to late for Apple to really look into it before 10.8.4's release. Hopefully, it will be fixed in a 10.8.5 update.

Jezra wrote:

Why has it taken months and months on this forum for the fact that holding down your Option key while clicking the "File" menu option causes "Save As" to appear to emerge???

Maybe because you didn't look carefully enough.

This information is contained in this post, which appeared almost exactly a month ago, just seven posts before yours!

To those who suggest that this thread should be abandoned because a dead horse is being beaten by a few strongly opinionated people, I confess that every time I receive an email telling me the thread has been updated by someone, I wonder whether I should ignore it or keep up the dialog. Well, here I am again.

It always feels better when others write in support of your own opinion, and I am not put off by any who challenge what I wrote with a capable, well-thought-out contrary point of view. I might even learn something in the process - which is why we are here in the first place.

GunnerBuck and Medicine Wolf are two new contributors who echo my sentiments about this change in Lion. To Tonza, I respond that I am very familiar with the use of templates and in fact make frequent use of the "Stationery Pad" option that has been an option in GetInfo since System 7 if I'm not mistaken. But that's not the point --- the letter I wrote to my landlord or bank or customer last month is neither a template nor a stationery pad item. It's just a letter than is already addressed and auto-dated with some paragraphs or graphic insertions that I want to use again, with some modifications. Save As allowed me to do that in one step. Auto-Save in Lion requires the additional step of going back to the just-opened original to close it after making the Duplicate.

But I would not be wasting my time … or yours … in this discussion if the only shortcoming was the time it takes to make an extra click. I am writing in support of the actual cost (in payroll dollars) that a business incurs when it has workgroups of dozens or hundreds of people who become confused about something as simple as a command (Save As) that they learned in their first computer lesson.

Believe me, I get the fact that Auto-Save could be a saving grace for managers whose employees have stubbornly refused to learn to save their work, and then they waste huge amounts of time and money having to start all over. I'm sure we've all had the experience of creating a complex spread sheet or writing a long text document and losing it before remembering to pause, save it with a name, and move on. But as Koenig illustrates, that accidental error isn't prevented by Lion's Auto save either if empty containers are the consequence.

There are 2 essential points in this thread, which I still hope will catch Apple's attention if the dialog remains 'on-point' is that changes like this can have significant impact on the productivity and workflow of users who operate computers as part of their job, not for recreation.

1. First, if as much time was put into the user instructions as they put into the colorful advertising of the features and benefits, users who upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion would learn the "why" rationale and the "how-to" for using it.
2. Second, there's no reason why this feature could not have been designed as a user-preference, with the File Menu reflecting the user's choice of old vs. new. They could also present a dialog every month that says "Would you like to learn about Auto-Save?" until the user makes the switch and direct you to a Support document or video or both. And there is certainly enough room in the File Menu to leave Save As in place forever, living comfortably alongside the new Duplicate command for occasions when Auto Save is not necessary, such as for changes that occur before the 5-minute period has elapsed.

Please don't lecture me about my ignorance of operating systems or why I don't want the documents to be auto-saved. In my graphic design work, for example, there are very good reasons why I don't want things saved until I am ready to commit those changes, and thank goodness Adobe has not (yet) denied me that privilege. In my database work (FileMaker) I have lived comfortably for 26 years with the knowledge that records are ALWAYS auto-saved when committed. And therein lies a distinction between work/documents that are creative and should remain in RAM, and data records that should never be vulnerable to a user's whim. By considering iWork documents to be one-and-the same, Apple has not considered that word processing and layout design work in Pages is not the same as experimation with numerical results in Numbers. With Keynote, I confess, I could go either way.

As far as Mission Control and Launchpad are concerned, there is a lot to be learned about the difference between a mobile device and a desktop computer (running Lion). Let me give you a few examples:

I use the new "Magic Mouse" whose surface is made of glass and whose behavior/sensitivity resembles the iPad and iPhone and iPod touch. I can't tell you how many times my hand has inadvertently brushed across the top of my mouse as I reach for it, and suddenly my desktop screen has shifted out of range and I need to use the Mission Control icon in the Dock to bring it back if I can't "swipe" it back the same way as I "swiped" it away.

Launchpad probably seemed to a developer like a cool way to emulate on the desktop what works so well on a mobile device. But they neglected and overlooked two important considerations:

1. First, the "search" panel that we have on the mobile device is absent on the Mac. I have hundreds more applications on my iMac than "apps" on my iPad and finding them can be a real pain. This is made even more a nuisance by the fact that Launchpad detects and displays ALL apps, regardless whether the user actuall uses them or not. Background processes, uninstallers, all kinds of everything that the OS regards as an APP are shown in Launchpad.
2. Sometimes, users keep several copies of the same application on hand. With the experience that new editions of Skype are sometimes defective, I keep the older ones around until I know the newer one works. As a FileMaker developer, I keep versions 9, 10, 11 and now 12 so that I can open files in the same version my clients use. The problem is that the icon for these applications is the same, making it impossible to know, when viewing them in Launchpad, which edition thay are, unless you rename the Application at the Finder level. Until Launchpad, it was enough to just name its parent folder.

Will these "defects" be corrected in future releases of Lion? Probably, but not unless people report their experience as users. Which brings me back again to my central point in this long discussion thread, something I have said again and again to those who argue that Apple will never change its thrust toward progress:

Improvements like the ones we are asking for, including the return of SAVE AS, take nothing away from those who want to use the newer "Versions" method of saving copies of files. Not one person asking for a return to SAVE AS has asked that Apple discontinue its innovative new software technique.

Look at the way your System Preferences of Lion compare to the System Preferences of Jaguar or Cheetah -- if that doesn't convince you that Apple has a tradition of responding to what users want for customizing their computer to the way they work, then I suggest you read or listen to what Steve Jobs wrote and said about the introduction of multiple FONTS on the first Macintish, when every previous computer had only 1 text character.

The only thing at issue here is this: should there be choice?

After reading through about half of the posts in this thread, I have come to the following conclusions:

1. Apple needs to put "Save As" back into it's applications.
2. Those who have been disagreeing with Item 1 above are either arrogant or clueless.
3. Ivan the Atheist is rude and his rudeness seems to be the only thing that makes him happy.

Kurt,

Thanks for the suggestion but Steve is right. Preview is a very under-rated app. Not only is it a good and fast viewer with the ability to crop images like Xee but it can also do the following:

• Adjust colour - with separate adjustments for exposure, contrast,saturation, temperature, tint, sepia and sharpness, or do an automatic colour adjustment making a pretty good improvement to the colour balance of an image with one click..
• Alter size and resolution.
• Annotate and add arrows, shapes and text to an image.
• Assign colour profiles for printers.
• Import from a scanner.

Plus very importantly in addition to "save as" it has "save all" . You can quickly crop and adjust colour, size etc. to individual images one by one and finally save them all with one click. If you prefer to save the images one by one and forget to save one it reminds you before you close the app.

The SL version was amazing. The lion version has been crippled, demasculated, rendered almost useless!

Preview was one of the best apps in the Apple arsenal, probably one of OS10's best selling points. Nothing else that I know of allows you to open multiple images simultaneously (100s if you want) , scroll through the thumbnails preparing each image for the web very quickly and easily. I don't think Apple are even aware of what a wonderful app they used to have and have blindly just ruined.

Mark

Not sure if it's been there all along (I don't think it was) but after making a change to the image and then selecting Duplicate, it now asks if you want to revert the original before opening the duplicate.

In a sense, giving you a Save As step to put the image back to its original state on the fly. Unfortunately, this is not the default choice, but at least it's there. Couldn't tell you if the rest of Apple's apps also behave this way (Final Cut X Pro, Pages, etc).

Thanks for sharing this thing, Kurt. I looked at it and my first reaction was "huh?" I suspect that a lot of users will be puzzled by the meaning of this dialog, not only what is the most appropriate response but also what caused it to pop-up in the first place.

By contrast, the one below needs no explanation for anyone who has used a computer since 1983. I've been in the Apple Store at the One-On-One desk where seniors, who are new to computers, are learning Save As for the first time. It takes about 10 seconds for someone to explain it, and they've learned it that fast. No questions asked.

Will they occasionally forget to save something and will they ever lose some work? Perhaps so. But I gotta tell you, I have had an open case with Apple since December 14 when a Keynote document I created on my iPad got "saved" to the iWork Cloud and nobody can open it. On the iPad, it can't even be seen in Keynote; it's just totally missing. When trying to view it in iCloud with Safari, you can click on it but nothing happens. Engineers took 3 months just to FIND it and now they tell me it's not recoverable.

My point: data can be vaporized. We make our best efforts to avoid data loss. Time Machine does a superb job of protecting people who otherwise neglect the process. Versions is a cool new way to do on-the-fly backups of individual files, but using it should be optional, and Save As should remain an option for those who want to use it, for whatever prehistoric reason they choose.

I still have Snow Leopard, and came to this discussion as I was trying to decide if I wanted to leap and upgrade to Lion. (both my systems are under a year old, I made sure to get them before Apple took away DVD drives!)

I was reading about all the features of Lion and when I started reading about the loss of Save As, I wanted to learn how to use Pages, Numbers, and Preview without that function. Man, what a nightmare. I am sticking with SL for as long as possible. Kurt, your latest about the "Duplicate and Revert" adds even more to my conclusion that the saving functions are so confusing!

In this dialog, it is basically doing the exact opposite of what I am used to doing. If I could choose Save As, instead of Duplicate I would be finished with my senario. Using this dialog box (first I have to really think about what I am doing here!!), it sounds like it is going to Duplicate my original document, then revert the duplicate to the previous state and then I will have two documents open. Now I will have two docs open. My original document with all the changes (so it's basically no longer an original!) and a new/duplicated document reverted to the original state. CONFUSING! for me anyway. Okay, at this point, what's my next step?

(Using Save As), I just Save As the original document and I have a new document with all the changes. My original does not need to get reverted, because it has stayed in its place and quietly reverted on its own. I don't need to remember that the Original/Old document is now the New/Changed document and the New/Reverted document is the Original/Old document.

Am I understanding this? Like I said, this is way too confusing!!

Kurt Lang wrote:

That covers it pretty well. I saw a couple of things to add after playing with an image in Lion with Preview.

Not sure if it's been there all along (I don't think it was) but after making a change to the image and then selecting Duplicate, it now asks if you want to revert the original before opening the duplicate.

In a sense, giving you a Save As step to put the image back to its original state on the fly. Unfortunately, this is not the default choice, but at least it's there. Couldn't tell you if the rest of Apple's apps also behave this way (Final Cut X Pro, Pages, etc).

Anyway, the point being it affects step six under Duplicate in Lion: a bit. If you chose "Duplicate and Revert", then the steps remain as is. If you chose the default of "Duplicate" and didn't want your original altered, then you have to add a step 7 to revert your original after closing it (or reverting while it's still open).

Either way, I can't see anything that's better about the new method. If this were the only way I could work, it would very much slow down how much work I can get done in a day as I use Save As dozens to hundreds of times a day. All of these extra steps for Duplicate would noticeably add up.

And just to show how half baked this whole system is, Preview wouldn't let me change a document. Now, I realize this is a first iteration under Lion, so there's bound to be some bugs, but I made some changes to an image and tried to close it with the changes. Preview told me I couldn't because the file was locked. I told it to Save Anyway, and then it told me I didn't have permission.

Wrong. I did a Get Info and the file was not locked, and I had full permissions. No matter what I tried to do in Get Info, I could not save the image directly over itself. I had to make a Duplicate and then save that.

while the Option key fix may not be the perfect solution, it is a solution.

This solution is far superior to using the Option key, though it requires using Mountain Lion. A couple of simple changes banishes Duplicate from the menus and ML behaves just like Snow Leopard and earlier. There are actually several changes below. The others are to get rid of the idiotic "make my Mac behave like an iPad" options of trying to make your Mac pick up where it left off every time you turn it back on.

I did post a link to this a few pages back in this thread, but it was probably easy to overlook, so here it is in its entirety.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Many users calling Apple directly, and posts on various web sites finally convinced Apple to return Save As. As you noticed though, it's not in the same place it held for over two decades. In particular, not for those programs written by Apple. It is possible to get Save As… back to its long time keystroke by following the steps below.

Step one: Open the System Preferences and click on the General tab. By default, two options are off. Turn on the check boxes for Ask to keep changes when closing documents, and Close windows when quitting an application.

The first is particularly important to Save As since you do not want Autosave/Versions saving anything without your consent. If you don't check the first box, your original document will receive the same changes as your Save As document, defeating the entire purpose of not having your original assume all of the same changes. The second isn't necessary to Save As, but if you're like me, you also have no desire for your desktop Mac to behave like an iPad, which restores all apps back to their last state during a startup or restart whether you want it to or not.

Step two: Related to the Close windows when quitting an application check box is reopening windows when logging back in. Again, it's an iPad like behavior, which many desktop users also didn't like. Select and Restart or Shut Down from the Apple menu and uncheck the box for Reopen windows when logging back in.

Your Mac will now work like any Mac before Lion, 10.7. Apps will not launch themselves and program windows will not restore themselves on a restart or power on.

Step three: Back to Save As. Open the System Preferences and click on Keyboard. Choose Application Shortcuts in the left column. By default, the only item there is Show Help menu. You're going to add a new one. Click the + button, type Save As and stop. Be sure to capitalize each word.

Three periods does not work here, you must enter a true ellipses. On a U.S. keyboard, that's Option+; (Option key plus the semi-colon). Where it asks what keystroke you want assigned to your new entry, press Command+Shift+S. Click the Add button and close the System Preferences. Your screen should look like the image below.

Close any applications you may have had open and relaunch them. Save As… will now replace Duplicate in all menus where Command+Shift+S would be. Duplicate will remain in your menus, but now has no keystroke (on the desktop, Command+D will be Duplicate, like it always has been). Save As will also work as you've always used it. After saving your document with a new name, you can close the original and it will do so without asking if your want to save your changes to the original. Even better, the original closes without any of the changes applied to it. And by having the check box on for Ask to keep changes when closing documents, you can close a document that has changes without Autosave/Versions saving those changes without asking. You will instead get a choice of Revert Changes, which will have the same effect as the old Don't Save.

If you search around, you'll find Terminal commands to completely disable Autosave/Versions globally. Don't do that. If you do, then even with the above changes, Save As… will disappear from Preview. The only commands in the menu to save any file will be Save or Export. The Terminal command doesn't affect TextEdit the same way, Save As… stays in the menu. I don't have any of the iLife or iWork apps, so I don't know how it would affect those. From those reporting who have tried these steps, Save As… returns to Command+Shift+S. It doesn't matter that Autosave/Versions is active at this point. With the changes above, your Mac will essentially behave like OS X in Snow Leopard or earlier. Not that Autosave/Versions working in the background still won't slow your system down when working with large files, but at this time, you can't have it both ways.

There are already several long threads about this subject.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mercredi 27 juillet 2011 16:00:58

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0

Please :

Search for questions similar to your own

before submitting them to the community

This time the keystring "Save as" AND lion would be efficient !

To be the AW6 successor, iWork MUST integrate a TRUE DB, not a list organizer !

This is just such a idiotic programming change it is unbelievable. The Save As command has existed for more than 20 years and literally tens of millions of people have learned what it means. So some idiot at Apple decided to do away with Save As which was working just fine and replace it with Duplicate and Save a Version. ???? Are you kidding me?

And they want us to write feedback notes, too?

How much time is wasted by something like this ... people screwing up their work, poking around in these discussions looking for answers, calling Apple Care, writing comments like the one I am writing now.

All because some lame-brain got a goofy idea about how to change the world and for no apparent benefit whatsoever. Let someone explain to me how Duplicate and Save a Version are in any way an improvement over the perfectly acceptable and successful way we have managed version changes since 1984.

Are you sure that it's the change which is "idiotic" as you wrote ?

Sometimes I wonder if this word wouldn't apply better to some ranters.

If you dislike the new features, uninstall Lion (which nobody forces you to buy) and return to the old fashioned system.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) jeudi 1 septembre 2011 10:13:26

iMac 21”5, i7, 2.8 GHz, 4 Gbytes, 1 Tbytes, mac OS X 10.6.8 and 10.7.0

My iDisk is : <http://public.me.com/koenigyvan>

Please : Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community