Hi, and welcome to the forum.
duckman1981 wrote:My wife and I have an important spreadsheet that we kept some records on over the past 12 months and we decided to make a new file, but keep the layout we'd been using. In order to do this, we used the MacOS function by right-clicking on the file and selecting 'duplicate', which of course created a copy of the original file. We then renamed them both, put one of them in a new folder, then continued to edit the new file.
However, after saving the file, we reopened the older one in the new folder and it was as if we just opened the new file, without the information we'd kept for the past year. So basically, we're just wanting to know what happened here?
Did you do this duplication, renaming, and movement to new folder while you were working on the spreadsheet in OpenOffice? I don't think that is a good idea. Close the spreadsheet in OpenOffice before you work on it in Finder. It can be confusing, both for you and for the computer, to access a file from two programs (Finder and OpenOffice) at the same time.
If you open a spreadsheet with OpenOffice, and move it with Finder while it's open, OpenOffice may not understand you did that and File → Save could go to the directory were the spreadsheet was originally opened. However if you made a duplicate
before making your changes and just edited one of the files, the
other one should be unchanged, even if it's not the one you thought it would be. I can't imagine both files could be changed unless you opened both of them in OpenOffice or unless you duplicated the file
after making the changes.
Read more about protecting/recovering your spreadsheet data in section
6. Saving your data and making backups in
Ten concepts that every Calc user should know. Also see Q23/A23 and Q24/A24 in
[Tutorial] Mac FAQ. Or use Finder to examine the Date Modified for your files and select one with a date/time before your changes.
If you need additional help understanding what happened, you will need to restate your post being very clear about what you did by giving the exact name of all the files involved, the directories they are in, the renaming and moving you did, the specific sequence of actions, what you expected to happen, and what happened instead. Words like "put one of them in a new folder" are too vague. Avoid use of pronouns ("this", "that", "it") and articles ("a", "the") since the antecedent or reference may not be clear.
File → Duplicate in Finder is a perfectly acceptable way to create a copy of a file. But you can also create a copy directly from OpenOffice. Open the original spreadsheet.
Before doing anything else use File → Save As to create a copy. You can put the copy in a different directory and give it a different name. Just be aware that if you continue to edit the spreadsheet, you are editing the new copy (in the new directory), not the original.
If this solved your problem please go to your first post use the Edit button and add [Solved] to the start of the title. You can select the green checkmark icon at the same time.Mr. Programmer
AOO 4.1.7 Build 9800, MacOS 13.6.3, iMac Intel. The locale for any menus or Calc formulas in my posts is English (USA).
