Why are pages not saving to Documents?

1. Maybe I missed a step in your explanation of 'using the up arrow' when saving, but mine only shows 'Locked' or not. I don't see an up arrow. And this is not on the' initial Save' but a renaming Save. Maybe that's why? In addition, several weeks/months go by and my expanded list to 50 doesn't show 50+ and the one I'm looking for might be 350th. Now I have to tax my memory, and often that isn't working for me.

1. You said: 'Look at the Pages File menu > Open Recent menu. Are there filenames there, or not? If so, selecting one will open it in Pages without you needing to know its location. Deleted documents are not automatically removed from this Recent Pages document stack.' If this is true, how does one permanently delete them?

I left a comment at Pages - Thank You - Apple but who knows if it will even be considered, or read. Everyone believes that they are but we can't know that for sure. While I'm not saying they have the time to respond to everyone, why not like right here in Support, we could log in to see if it was read and if any comments by the team there were added.

Initially, Pages may save a document to iCloud until you change it. Pages will continue to save documents in the previously saved location until you alter the save location. Where Pages saves documents has nothing to do with its (preferences) settings.

I recommend that you thoroughly reference Pages User Guide for Mac - Apple Support as that will reduce your unfamiliarity with the application and your WT_ frustration in using it.

The first thing you should do when creating a new document is select File menu > Save… and give the document a real name instead of Untitled.pages. Click the Save button. That also triggers autosave and versioning which are not enabled until the document is manually saved once. Pressing the Option key changes the File menu > Duplicate menu item to Save As…

While on that initial Save panel, you need to expand it so that you have improved save location choices. Click the red indicated box (below) on that panel so it looks like mine — facing up.

That arrow up will expand the default minimal Save panel window with more Finder Window-like options for where you wish to save your documents. Pages will remember this expanded panel view.

Look at the Pages File menu > Open Recent menu. Are there filenames there, or not? If so, selecting one will open it in Pages without you needing to know its location. Deleted documents are not automatically removed from this Recent Pages document stack.

You can set how many previous Pages documents appear on that Recents panel via System Settings > Control Center > and increasing the value in the last item on that panel – Recent documents, applications, and servers 10 ↕︎. Mine is set at 10. That list of unique (no duplicate names for multiple edits) filenames shown is a stack of fixed size. First on is last off. Editing the 11th document bumps the previous last file off the stack. That stack is not updated if a file is deleted, so bear that in mind.

OutsideShooter wrote:

1. Maybe I missed a step in your explanation of 'using the up arrow' when saving, but mine only shows 'Locked' or not. I don't see an up arrow. And this is not on the' initial Save' but a renaming Save. Maybe that's why? In addition, several weeks/months go by and my expanded list to 50 doesn't show 50+ and the one I'm looking for might be 350th. Now I have to tax my memory, and often that isn't working for me.

The initial Save…, Save As…, or Export To > Save dialogs all have that arrow button on them as depicted in my previous post. That up/down arrow toggles the panel view from limited to expanded.

The Open Recent menu will show the Pages documents that you have opened and quit, or opened, edited, and saved. As I said, the Recent menu is a fixed stack of the size you set it to in System Settings. Once you exceed that stack size in opened documents, the oldest document is removed from it. That is how a stack behaves.

If you want to look for Pages documents older than your configured Recent menu stack holds, I will talk more about Spotlight below.

2.

You said: 'Look at the Pages File menu > Open Recent menu. Are there filenames there, or not? If so, selecting one will open it in Pages without you needing to know its location. Deleted documents are not automatically removed from this Recent Pages document stack.' If this is true, how does one permanently delete them?

I left a comment at Pages - Thank You - Apple but who knows if it will even be considered, or read. Everyone believes that they are but we can't know that for sure. While I'm not saying they have the time to respond to everyone, why not like right here in Support, we could log in to see if it was read and if any comments by the team there were added.

These are fellow Mac user-supported public communities. No Apple employees participate here. There is a Provide Pages Feedback application menu that goes directly to the Pages product team, but owing to the volume of this feedback, they most likely will not respond to the email associated with your Apple ID or included on that feedback.

Spotlight is a tool that indexes files on your Mac and from which the Finder or the Spotlight tool allows one to locate files on your Mac. The Spotlight categories can be seen in System Settings > Spotlight panel. I have all of these selected except Siri Suggestions. Your Mac may be already indexing files but to be certain, select those categories (especially Documents) and on that panel, click the Search Privacy… button.

On that search Privacy panel, you would drag and drop your Macintosh HD icon on your Desktop into Privacy Locations drop area, wait 10 seconds, and then click on Macintosh HD on that panel and then click [-] to remove it. Once removed, Spotlight will begin to index the files on your startup drive. Give that about 15 - 30 minutes to finish.

Now, you can search for Pages documents older than what is shown on your Pages Open Recent stack. Here are some examples of a Spotlight search that can be applied after clicking the 🔍 on the top right Finder menu bar, or from the Search panel in an open Finder Window. Apple has a support document for narrowing your search in Spotlight or Finder:

Narrow your search results on Mac - Apple Support

Find any Pages document created in the last month:

kind:pages created:11/01/2024-11/30/2024

Any Pages document created in 2024 (you can use <>- characters for before, after, or between dates)

kind:pages created:>01/01/2024

Any Pages document modified after June 1, 2024, in which you used a Baskerville font:

kind:pages modified:>06/01/2024 font:baskerville

Any Pages document created after Sept 2024 whose name contains a partial (case-insensitive) string. In this case, looking for a Pages document named kant_jacobian.pages:

kind:pages created:>09/01/2024 name:kant

If you are using the Finder menu item 🔍 to initiate a Spotlight search, you can arrow down to the specific found document. By pressing the cmd key, it will show you the file location, or by pressing cmd+R it will open a Finder window with that file selected. Simply pressing the return key of a selected file will open it in Pages.