12-08-2010, 11:56 PM

I am in the process of building a summary for a law school exam in 2 days. I have been working on it for months, but because PCs cannot read Mac files, I had to save a very early copy of this file over to .doc for sending it to someone. It had the same name, only it was a doc and not a Mac file.

I accidentally opened the old .doc file and began editing all the old files, hours and hours and hours of work (14 hours yesterday/last night) and then clicked CTRL + S. It asked me if I was sure if I wanted to save, and for some ridiculous, absurd reason, it saved my work as a Mac file EVEN THOUGH THE .DOC one was open.

This of course replaced the months of work I have been doing. I have been told by friends (who did not make the mistake of buying iWork and bought Microsoft Word for Mac) that Word allows you to recover particular states of the document. Can I do this in pages, and how?

Please help! This file is of invaluable importance to me right now.

12-09-2010, 12:03 AM

I just realized that I saved this to my iPod as a backup last night, and actually do have the work, thank god thank god. Still, how COULD I have gotten it back if not, and WHY would it save a .doc file AUTOMATICALLY to a Pages one??

12-09-2010, 12:17 AM

Also, why would Apple not put an autosave into its program? If any die-hard Apple fans here are inclined to say "because it's up to YOU to save," I'll point out that cars still have airbags despite the need for driver caution. This seems like a terrible oversight, and possibly one of the reasons WORD is not only available for Mac as a Microsoft product, but also the fact it's twice as expensive.

I like my Macbook, I like my iPod, but iWork is an absolute joke. Their spell checker is ridiculous, too.

12-09-2010, 12:45 AM

And Office is twice as good IMHO.

Sadly there is no comparison between Office and iWork, and as for the free programs, we get what we pay for.

12-09-2010, 02:26 AM

@gizmo8899

Pages has its good and bad. The good is that it's a great app for doing layout work - such as flyers, bulletins, ads, and so forth. The bad is that it can not save by default to the de facto standard documents - MS Office. However, if you're aware of that fact, it's a simple matter to do a "save as" each time and specify *.doc or whatever. Inconvenient, but it's there.

Buy a copy of MS Office 2011 if you're serious about doing papers for law school.

12-09-2010, 07:05 AM

Originally Posted by gizmo8899

I just realized that I saved this to my iPod as a backup last night, and actually do have the work, thank god thank god. Still, how COULD I have gotten it back if not, and WHY would it save a .doc file AUTOMATICALLY to a Pages one??

It didn't save anything automatically. You accidentally told it to overwrite.

As for the change of format, Pages *isn't* Microsoft Office, so .doc is NOT its native format. When YOU told it to overwrite, *of course* it would overwrite in its native format. Because it's Pages, not MS Office.

If .doc is THAT important to what you do, use MS Office. Pages is (IMHO) better, but it's *NOT* MS Office and is never going to be. The weak link in your setup, *as described by you*, is visible by looking in a mirror.

PS. What's the point of autosave when you have Time Machine?

12-09-2010, 12:51 PM

Command+Shift+S

save as:

check 'Word'

Generally handles any issues.