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Open recent file

Three programs I use a lot are Numbers, Pages and Swift Publisher. Since Catalina the menu item file > open recent is empty regardless of how many files recently saved. Obviously "open recent" saves time searching through the finder for a project Im currently working on. How do I get this feature back? Anyone else experiencing this anomaly?

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.15

Posted on Jan 26, 2020 9:18 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 26, 2020 11:09 PM

I haven't seen it. Check System Preferences > General and make sure "Recent Items:" isn't set to "None". If not, try setting it to a different value and restart your Mac.


You can also try resetting NVRAM.

Reset NVRAM or PRAM on your Mac - Apple Support

7 replies

Jan 27, 2020 1:19 PM in response to dialabrain

That was the first thing I checked. However, I am not talking about "recent items" under the apple menu in the finder. I am referring to the "open recent" in the program's menu under file. It always showed the last few files I was working on in that program. I do not see any preference available to control this feature. It is happening in Pages, Numbers and Swift Publisher which are three programs I use frequently. "Recent Items" in the finder menu seems to be working as expected.

Jan 29, 2020 5:44 PM in response to Clusseau

UPDATE:

When booting from my clone drive which is still set on Mac OS Mojave 10.14 all programs work as expected. Swift Publisher, Pages and Numbers all show “open recent” files. Therefor the problem must exist in the mew Mac OS Catalina 10.15 system.


I do appreciate any and all help with this problem.


APPLE, APPLE, APPLE

Feb 3, 2020 11:53 AM in response to Clusseau

Ok well no help here I guess. I did contact Belight Software, the Swift Publisher company and got some helpful instant replies. After some back and forth testing a solution was forthcoming. Open a new user account. Simple but it worked. The anomalies experienced with Swift Publisher, Pages, Numbers where "open recent" command was blocked gone, and now the applications work as expected. However, we still do not know what file in my original user account was corrupted causing this anomaly to appear. So we are still investigating. It appears no one else has experience this situation which I find unusual.

Feb 7, 2020 4:04 AM in response to StAlbanian

On further investigation (!) I think the issue may be that 'open recent' in Pages (along with other Apple apps) is controlled through System Preferences for the whole operating system ('Recent Items'). This is different from MS Word where the setting is in preferences for the app itself. I'm guessing that other new to Pages, and trying to avoid upgrading from 32-bit Word to an MS Office 365 subscription, may find this confusing, too.

Open recent file

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