pages file is missing its index.xml file?

There's an easy fix for this problem. If you are in pages, go to the sidebar.

Click on pages, a number of selections come up. Click on "Quit Pages". Now go back to your document and it should

open. The same occurs if the document you can't open is a numbers document.

peter!

can i /please/ ask you for some more information on this? i am getting absolutely creamed with this issue.

i have a mac air and a mac pro (and an iphone). i am running yosemite on both these computers.

i have been /storing/ a lot of data on DROPBOX and i ran into an issue where my newer pages documents had siingle quotes all over the place so i tried to keep using 4.3 as i remember.

currently on the air where i am trying to open documents from DROPBOX i am seeing that i have 4.3 and 5.6.1 loaded. i ALSO see that i do have an iWork 09 folder and i see now that this will open a 5.6.1 version of pages.

is it possible on the laptop that i finally (?) deleted the most recent version of pages (whatever that is) - and is it possible this is creating issues?

basically right now if i double click on a pages document on DROPBOX i get the xml error (i also get an error that the document is not available which i think is another issue) and if i try to open with 4.3 i don't seem to get anything.

i am googling here trying to find other information but i am on a sort of deadline and this business is confounding.

IS IT POSSIBLE that working on the mac pro at home will let me open these documents without having the problems i am having at the coffee shop right now?

can you remind me of the methodology to fix this issue? do i download the MOST RECENT version of pages, run a search <sigh>, open all my pages documents <double sigh>, and then export them all as 4.3 versions or 5.6.1 versions - and then DELETE the MOST RECENT version of pages, or delete all versions of pages except 4.3??

THANKS for anything if you have the time to help me out here....

jon

oh, and i guess upgrading to El Capitan won't solve this....?

There's an easy fix for XML File is missing. Here it is...you are either pages or numbers. If you are in pages, go to the sidebar.

Click on the word "Pages", the selections drop down....click on "Quit Pages". Go back to your document and it should

open.

If you are in Numbers, click on the word "Numbers", the selections drop down...click on "Quit Numbers".

Go back to your document and it should open.

I do not believe that Dropbox lists any Pages document as a supported file format on its site.

Many people have fallen into clicking the red traffic light in the Pages '09 document title bar in full belief that this closes the document and quits Pages '09. It does not do the latter. Which means that Pages '09 is the dominant application to intercept any subsequent Pages document open requests, rather than Pages v5.

Thanks!!! This worked for me.

All one has to do is actually quit Pages '09, and then a simple double-click on the same document will open it in Pages v5. That is all there is to it.

Pages '09 will not quit when closing its document with the red traffic light in the titlebar. Since it is running, it will intercept any double-click on a Pages document, even if that document cannot be opened (Pages v5 document) in it. Pages v5 documents do not use the internal index.xml file that is used in Pages '06 through Pages '09 documents.

hi peter,

always extremely helpful posts.

i am hoping to find the time to transfer my "life workflow" to a large cloud based company so I can do things like open appointment locations in an app of my choice. I've concluded this major aggravation is simply one example of a host of issues related to my preferred workflow for this suite of apps. pages of course is another issue I need to tackle. i am still struggling with it mostly due to a lack of time to devote to this problem.

can I please ask you to update or perhaps I will remember to post asking you what you end up doing? I /also/ have to do something in this respect and currently as far as I know all my images continue to reside in a very large aperture database.

REGARDS

Unfortunately I have not been able to find a good substitute for Pages '09 or Aperture yet so I continue using them, but make sure I save to a more compatible file format.

I have a large number of drives and versions of OSes, about to add Windows 10 to the mix on a Netbook/Tablet, so I can keep legacy Apps and set-ups going.

I still have System 8.6 on an old Indigo iMac I picked up for peanuts, just so I can run Quark XPress 4.3 and some old games I am hooked on. Still boots up faster than my new iMac and gives me less grief. 🙂

Apple pushes us into a corner, but I sidestep and push back.

Peter

None of these solutions work . I have both pages 4.3 and five. click right cloick and open from file menu give either missing index.xml or "some error". Bogus , I have hundreds of old pages files all of which will not open. APPLE ***!

Only Pages '06, '08, and '09 documents contain the internal index.xml file. When you open a Pages v5 document (entirely different document architecture), with Pages '09, it will tell you that the expected index.xml file is missing. Clicking the red traffic light in a Pages '09 document will close that document, but not quit Pages '09. It will continue running, and will intercept all attempts to open Pages documents, even not its own. Pages '09 must be quit before normal Pages v5 behavior will resume.

If you have attempted to upload Pages '09 or v5 documents to Google Drive, they are now damaged, because Drive will attempt to unzip them, or their contents into folders that are meaningless to any version of Pages.

It's very frustrating. They have ruined Pages, Mail, Calendar, and other software than I used on a daily basis. I am a professional editor and when I opened their "new and improved" version of Pages and couldn't even see a page or word count on the screen, I had to stop using it. Apparently they thought that people would only be using these things on their phones for emoji filled fun, and they threw all the millions of lifelong professional users into the trash as being not worthy of Apple's time and attention. I actually had to go out and buy freaking MS Office, which I hate because Pages was a much better program. I go to Apple's feedback page at least once a week and harangue them about Pages, Mail and Calendar. I urge others who have had their workflow system ruined by these ridiculous software changes to do the same. We don't want baby-ware, we need fully functional professional programs.

i too run a professional business along with my life on Mac and I just told them (albeit very reluctantly and with lots of love) that I was breaking up with Mac software and migrating my calendar, mail, contacts, image handling, word editing and other mission critical items to some other (large cloud based?) third party. perhaps MS office with the addition of MSAccess may help in this transition?

the bummer is that any third party vendors that plug into Mac software are items I can no longer consider buying.

perhaps I will start a conversion thread based upon my specific needs and post a link here so those that are creating a parallel setup to assist the Mac functionality in this area can help each other out...

i am obviously not abandoning these Mac software but as a professional it wold be derelict of me not to start working with parallel or added functionality...

I haven't used Access for a long time, but I did end up getting MS Office 365 so I could actually get some work done. I think there is a huge opportunity for someone to come up with a working suite that blows both the MS and Apple systems away.

I'm still hoping Apple will fix the problems with Mail -- I have a dozen email accounts, most of which are web admins for various clients, and now they ALL appear in one shared InBox, it drives me absolutely insane. I used Bento as my contact database for years and either Filemaker killed it or Apple killed it when they bought Filemaker. And even though I owned an earlier Filemaker license AND a separately purchased Bento license, they want me to pay full price for another Filemaker license. I told them to stuff it.

Their decision to break up calendar into separate apps was one of the stupidest moves ever. Calendar. Tasks. Notes. Reminders. Ridiculous. Why would they make a perfectly good system less efficient? It makes the whole system too annoying to use. I remember when Jobs marched back into a company that had so many different offerings they didn't even know what they were selling, and clients didn't know what to buy. He said "We are throwing out all this crap. We need to offer one professional desktop and one professional laptop; one home desktop and one home laptop. That's it." That's what brought this company back from disaster -- focus, simplicity. Now they are breaking things up that shouldn't be broken up, and simplifying the things that actually need to offer complex functions. I have tremendous respect for Cook, but it broke my heart to get up one morning and not be able to do any work for my clients for three days because Apple ruined its own software. That's not the kind of betrayal I ever expected to encounter from Apple.

What kind of word processor doesn't even tell you the word count? The page count? Even if you are not going to a printed document, you still need to know the word count. What if you're a grant writer and you need to meet exact specifications, like describing a complex process in only 100 words? You need to see the exact word count on the screen as you type and work out the ideas. That one thing alone killed Pages for me. As an editor and writer I cannot work without a live, on-screen word count.

Argh! OK, that's enough of a rant. I should get back to work! -Karen

You are not talking to Apple here. Just rambling on to us international volunteers about your various Apple product experiences — that are not problems that can be fixed in this support community. Use Apple's Feedback site to communicate directly to the Apple Product teams.