Why does pages lock documents?

It's part of lion's autosave/versioning scheme:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4753

As far as I know there's no way to avoid it, but if you follow the directions in the kbase you can set the time as high as one year before a document gets locked.

If you don't like it (I don't either), be sure to send feedback to apple.

Kat,

I think the idea is that if a document hasn't been opened for some period of time, you may want to consider if you really want to edit that version, or if you should begin with a Duplicate of the document and go from there. This could prevent accidental loss or change of data on a file that's only used for occasional reference.

Jerry

If the file is automatically versioned (i.e. automatically duplicated), this is a silly feature. I can just go back to the version I want. All this feature does is put an obstacle between my spark of inspiration and getting it on the page.

Fortunately, one can just turn it off, in that same place, by unchecking it. All good now.

HacksawSA wrote:

If the file is automatically versioned (i.e. automatically duplicated), this is a silly feature. I can just go back to the version I want. All this feature does is put an obstacle between my spark of inspiration and getting it on the page.

Versions and Duplicates aren't the same. A Duplicate rolls up all the version data into a new unversioned document. There may be times where this is an advantage, but of course you are the best judge of that.

Jerry