Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Level 1

25 points

Locked documents in Pages

I opened several old Pages documents tonight in Lion. I was surprised to see that the title bar indicated that the document(s) were locked. Clicking on the word Locked I found I could unlock them. The documents were saved in Dropbox. I'm puzzled why they were marked locked. I don't recall locking them. Is this some sort of new default?

Why would the system lock files without my request for it to do so?

Overall, I like the idea of locking documents so avoid accidentally modifying files I didn't intend to modify. Is this a feature of Versions? If so, what are the things I should know about this feature. One of my major issues with Apple software is the lack of any overview of new features to make it easy to adopt the new version of the software and stay out of trouble with the changes. They should have people with a customer view of the world be writing things to explain the features of a product, the things to watch for, and maintain a FAQ as questions arise and get answered.

iMAC Early 2009, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Aug 4, 2011 9:42 PM

18 replies

Apr 5, 2012 4:53 AM in response to RobertCailliau

[sorry, previous post cut short by some incident]

The limit of two weeks for locking files in the file system is NOT a Finder preference but a Time Machine preference! (very intuitive as some would say).

It can be changed in the System Preferences—>Time Machine—>Options:

User uploaded file

As you can see, I turned it off completely.

I wonder at which update it will be turned back on again behind my back, just to protect me from myself.

dichen

Level 1

4 points

Apr 20, 2012 5:57 AM in response to bkitchin

Thanks Robert Cailliau and bkitchin and everyone else - thanks to your posts you solved the problem. Generally I really like using Apple products but every 12 months or so they really bugger things up. Final Cut X has shifted me to Adobe Premier Pro and Pages is about to shift me back to Word. There is nothing intuitive in hiding the "lock files" in the time machine - which I never use and never intend to use. One does wonder what developers are thinking when they do this kind of thing. Fortunately I have managed to hide much of Lion by using Pathfinder as my front end. I think that I would go insane using the Lion interface.

Apr 20, 2012 12:18 PM in response to dichen

dichen:

Agree. However, Time Machine is a useful program. Thanks for pointing me to PathFinder. My main reason for going Mac in 1984 was that I could actually see my files and operate on them. The Finder has been good, but has not improved recently. Basic things have not been put straight, e.g. the width of a column in column view should be an attribute of the folder whose files are displayed in that column, so that the column width is set by me and remembered for each folder. I pointed this out a long time ago, but nothing has been done except cosmetics.

Etc. etc.

Lion is so deficient for the power user that I am seriously thinking of switching to Linux.

Locked documents in Pages