HELP! I saved a document. Copied the document. Went to delete some extra characters. Accidentally deleted the entire document. Now I can't find my document. When I open the saved document, the page is blank. Does Pages save copied text anywhere?

Question

I saved a document.  Copied the document.  Went to delete some extra characters and accidentally deleted the text of the entire document.  I did not save a blank page.  I cannot recover the lost text.  Please Help.  I'm NEW to Pages. 

Answer 1

Hi Jan,
Copied text (or other copied material) is on the Clipboard, but only until you copy something else or log out of your account. If you act before doing another copy, you can paste the copied material back into the document. If you don't act right away, you may still have a path back.
One of the most useful keystroke combinations on the Mac is the "Oops! key," as a friend of mine once named it. That's command-Z, also known as "Undo". In some applications it will let you undo only a single step, but in others, including Pages, you can do repeated undos, so it's not quite so essential that you act immediately on making an error. Undo, done via the Oops! key, or via the Edit menu takes you back one change at a time. You can't skip any steps, so to get back to the state before the accidental deletion, you'll have to undo any work you've done since then. The memory of what to Undo disappears when you close the document or quit the application.
At that point you're at the mercy of your backup plan. If you've had Time Machine running, you'll be able to enter Time Machine and go back to an earlier, saved version of the file.
All these are in addition to the steps Ian suggested above.
Regards,
Barry
PS: Best piece of advice I can give a new Pages user (beyond Backup early and often) is to download and read through the first few chapters of the Pages '09 User Guide, available through the Help menu in Pages '09. Mostly pretty easy reading, and will get you through the basics without much trouble.
B