Pages keeps creating new doc. when saving

Solution: Uncheck the Save copy as Word Document accessory in the Pages '09 Save panel. When checked, it overrides saving the Pages document, and writes out another Word document. Then the Finder attempts to intervene to avoid an overwrite. If your Pages '09 document is still named Untitled.pages, then I recommend you save it with a proper name, which will enable autosave and versioning in Pages '09 v4.1 or later.

Pages is not a Word clone, and does not work in the native Word document format as does MS Word itself. Pages translates the original Word content into Pages internal .pages document format, and then translates again — on your only Word output avenue — export to Word. Your original Word document remains unchanged.

I have the same problem and the solution doesn't work on Pages 6.0.

I would be willing to use Pages as my default text editor (even if having to export it to .doc every timeI create a new doc) but this problem disturbs so much that it's a reason by itself not to.

My original response to the OP involved Pages '09, which works quite differently than Pages v6.0. So, you do not have the same exact problem as the OP.

Pages v6 is a word processing application, not a text editor, even though it can export to text. If you just want a plain text editor, then the free TextWrangler, or even Apple's TextEdit can do that for you, without dealing with Pages v6 at all.

Pages v6 cannot open, edit, or save Word documents, because it is not a Word clone. It must translate the Word document into Pages proprietary .pages document format — on open, or export back to Word. Once a Pages document is saved once, (preferably not as Untitled.pages) then Pages will autosave any changes to your Pages document about every 10 - 15 seconds.

OK, then independently of how it's classified, independently wether it's a clone of word or not, it doesn't have the facility of editing a previously existing document and, after done, simply saving the updated version.

For people who write this is a must, once they don't want to keep endless versions of revised text and usually prefer to choose the occasions of preserving the previous versions.

Thanks for the answer.

Once a Pages document is saved once, autosave, and versions are enabled. You aren't aware of versions, but from the File menu : Revert To : Browse All Versions — you can get back to a specific Pages edit in a Time Machine like view.

Doesn't help with Word documents though, and for that, Word or LibreOffice Writer may be the better solution, particularly for the huge amount of additional features that support writers.