What happened to Save As?

Kurt Lang wrote:

If you do all of the steps I outlined, it also puts the OS X back to the way long time users expect the OS to work. It never made sense to break 25 years of menu commands by suddenly moving/changing it.

Kurt, I applied the change you suggested in Keyboard Preferences at home last night, and it worked like a charm! Thanks very much for passing this along.

PP writes (in response to DChord):

"Wow, you are a racist."

If this is a serious comment, I'd be interested in learning the evidence of racism you found in DChord's comments. If it's just a silly comment, or a meaningless one, there's no need to respond.

Regards,

Barry

One thing that really threw long time Mac users was that Save As shifted at all. From the beginning of the Mac OS, Apple made it clear to all developers that certain guidelines were to be followed at all times for consistency between apps. Users didn't have to learn different keyboard commands from app to app to do the same thing. Command+Q is always Quit, Command+O is always Open, etc.

Then comes Lion and Apple breaks their own guidelines by moving Save As to a different keystroke. So there you are using Command+Shift+S in any Adobe software, MS Office, you name it. Until you use any Lion updated app from Apple, and for those it's suddenly Command+Option+Shift+S.

Sorry folks, I have been absent from this discussion for a long time, having come to grips with the Mountail Lion "improvements" that we lobbied for, long and hard. It was worth it. Thanks to all who helped.

Seeing a flurry of recent posts in my inbox, I wondered what might be going on that's new. So I see now that we have a stand-in for Yvan, who is sprinkling something on all of us. *** is that all about?!?! Good grief.

Anyway, thanks to Kurt for posting the tips about how to manage certain preferences.

And for those who raised the issue about scanners .. here is what I learned. If you have an older scanner that uses a TWAIN driver, it won't work in Photoshop the way it did before with the Import command, but your Apple Image Capture program will probably drive the scanner. In my case, I have a Canon LIDE 70 scanner and it will work not only with Image Capture but also with Canon's scanner software.

I'm not ready to buy a newer scanner on the promise that it will work with Apple's new method of driving scanners because I don't want to also spend unnecessary money upgrading my Adobe software too, because scanning is just an occasional thing in my work.

pjmetz wrote:

Even more important, what if you want to save a file in a different file type, such as saving a Numbers spreadsheet as Excel. You can't do that with Duplicate. You have to use Save As...!

Actually, that's not entirely correct. To save a Numbers spreadsheet as Excel (or a Pages document as Word, etc.), the preferred method is to use the File Menu's Export... command.

Although I will say there's one weird related Mountain Lion anomaly that baffles me. You used to be able to choose Export... and then be taken to a screen with the various Export choices listed left to right. (In Pages, for example, they're .pdf., Word, Rich Text and Plain Text.) You then selected the format you wanted and keyed the Export key.

In Mountain Lion, when you choose Export... you get a submenu with those choices — but upon choosing one, you're taken to that same screen, with your choice highlighted.

Why does this matter? Well, I do a lot of Exporting out of Pages to Word documents (for clients) and .rtf (for the web designer at my firm to use, as he's on Windows). Previously, I was able to designate a Keyboard Shortcut in Keyboard Preferences that opened up the box directly. Now, I can no longer do this. And as far as I can tell, there's no way to create a Keyboard Shortcut for a submenu.

Under both the old and new systems, you still have to use the mouse at some point. So why the extra unnecessary step with the submenu to get to the same place?

It's just another example of wishing you could sit down with the designer and say, "OK, explain to me why this is better than it was before."

DChord568,

You can make separate keyboard shortcuts for the different ways you want to export. In addition to the various export options being in a submenu under Export, they also appear in the Share menu.

Hi DChord:

I am new to Numbers and have never used Export, except in AppleWorks. Just got the a new iMac for Xmas and am finally using it and converting all my old AppleWorks spreadsheets to Numbers (sigh!).

I think I bought my old iMac in 2006 (yep, ship date 12/28/06), so all the Lion controversies didn't affect me. In the past, the way you converted files was to choose Save As and then a file format. That is how I converted AppleWorks spreadsheets into Excel spreadsheets for my accountant. Presumably Save As in Numbers will do the same.

Why not try it; it might save you grief.

I will really miss AppleWorks (formerly ClarisWorks). It had a Draw, Paint, and Database function as well as text and spreadsheet.

Regards,

Paula

Badunit wrote:

DChord568,

You can make separate keyboard shortcuts for the different ways you want to export. In addition to the various export options being in a submenu under Export, they also appear in the Share menu.

I'll be ******! I have to confess that I totally missed the Share menu in the updated iWork Suite. I was looking in the old place in the File Menu and never caught this. I've now successfully created a Keyboard Shortcut for Export to .pdf (the format I use most often).

Thank you very much for this!

pjmetz wrote:

Hi DChord:

I am new to Numbers and have never used Export, except in AppleWorks. Just got the a new iMac for Xmas and am finally using it and converting all my old AppleWorks spreadsheets to Numbers (sigh!).

I think I bought my old iMac in 2006 (yep, ship date 12/28/06), so all the Lion controversies didn't affect me. In the past, the way you converted files was to choose Save As and then a file format. That is how I converted AppleWorks spreadsheets into Excel spreadsheets for my accountant. Presumably Save As in Numbers will do the same.

Why not try it; it might save you grief.

Hi Paula --

It's true that Save As... in iWork will give you the option to Export to Word, Excel or PowerPoint (in Pages, Numbers and Keynote respectively). However, you have to take the extra step of checking the box that appears in the dialog to activate it.

The method Badunit outlines above seems the simplest. And the fact that you can create a Keyboard Shortcut for it makes it easier still, as you can then complete the entire operation via keyboard strokes, bypassing the mouse altogether.

I really miss the "Save As" function that seems to be disappearing from various Mac apps. Now what, we have to use the Duplicate, Rename, and Move functions to do the same thing that Save As used to? Ridiculous! Why mess with things that already work well, to make them harder and reduce functionality?

I miss Cover Flow as well, but that was mainly aesthetic. Save As was a very useful function and there was no reason to mess with it. Apple is obviously abandoning its legacy desktop users to integrate OS X with iOS.

>Why mess with things ...

Totally agree!

But Apple actually listened to our protest cries and reinstituted Save As (almost) in Mountain Lion.

At least you can define it now yourself from the System Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts.

( As described in an earlier response in this thread.)

Good luck!

with best regards,

Omar K N

(Stockholm, Sweden)

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.

In that case "save as" has not been restored to us. It is a different command that confusingly usurps the title of the old 'save as'.

If it 'aint broke don't fix it.

When a product has reached its zenith and all directions are down hill, it is almost inevitable that a new product manager will make it worse because he needs to do something to justify his salary and to hide the fact that he has been promoted one level above his level of competence. Or perhaps it is because he has been promoted one level above is competence that he messes with perfection.

It reminds me of the time about 20 years ago when they changed the taste of Coke. I wonder where that manager is now? Probably running Apple!

To fix how Save As behaves, click on page 70 of this thread. I've posted a solution there that makes OS X behave as it did in Snow Leopard or earlier. The main problem with it is that you can only do those steps in Mountain Lion. Lion is pretty much stuck the way it is.

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.

It's true that this was the situation when Save As was first reintroduced in Mountain Lion. The howls of protest intensified, and in a subsequent update, I believe this was fixed.

I'm on the most updated version of Mountain Lion, and I just tried an experiment in Pages now. Here's what I did:

1) Wrote a line of text (Line 1) and saved my document (named as Save As Test #1) for the first time at 1:59:55

2) Added some new text (Line 2), and then did a Save As at 2:00:30 (naming this document Save As Test #1a).

3) The document on my screen changed to one named Save As Test #1a, just as historically it has always done when Save As is invoked. It showed Line 1 and Line 2 of text.

4) Reopened Save As Test #1. This document had only the text it had when I saved it at 1:59:55 (Line 1). It did not have the text I added (Line 2) after this.

Now I'm guessing if there is a long interval between the time you add new text to a previously saved document and the time you do your Save As, it's possible the original document may have autosaved in the interim, so that the newer text you added would be there when you go back to that document.

But in theory, the older version without the new text should be there in a previous Version, which you could go back to be clicking the triangle to the right of the document title.

In fact, interestingly enough...if I browse Versions in my Save As Test #1 above, the next Version back has both Line 1 and Line 2 of text. But the frontmost version has the document as it appeared before I added that text (i.e., Line 1 only)!

This is probably very confusing if you don't have these documents right in front of you. I would suggest conducting an experiment along the lines I just outlined, and it should become clearer.

The bottom line is that, as far as I can see, Save As actually does function the way it did back in Snow Leopard and previously.

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