They’re “packages”, which means that they’re folders disguised to look like files. What has gone wrong here? You can dig into iWork files (Numbers, Pages, Keynote). If you had really valuable stuff in here, and no means of rolling back, you would be absolutely furious – justifiably so – with Apple. You’re left unable to open the file, with no idea what has gone wrong, and no clues how to progress. Whichever it’s a terrible, terrible experience for the user. Did the engineer/s assign an out-of-bounds error code to the problem, and the operating system can’t decide what to say and so falls back to “for some reason”? This is a giant screwup “For some reason.” How this ever got past any sort of quality assurance I cannot imagine. At which point the “Time Machine” interface resolves itself into a rectangle, in which you find this message: Or you can realise you’re onto a lost cause and give up. This happens no matter how far back you want to go. You then go into a Time Machine interface, and get this: The spreadsheet can’t be opened “for some reason”? What sort of error message is that?īut at least it offers the option to “Browse all versions”, which should be stored in iCloud, where the spreadsheet itself is stored.

(Whether it was open or not is immaterial some other spreadsheets were open before the update and opened fine afterwards some were closed before the update and opened fine afterwards some were closed before and wouldn’t open afterwards.) I’d had it open before the update, but (I think) had closed it before updating. Having done that, I tried to open one of my most-used spreadsheets, into which I have poured years of experience and hours of analysis. Then I updated Numbers from 3.6.2 to 4.0, whose “new” features are apparently collaboration – and nothing much else. Having not seen any reports of gigantic showstopping bugs in the upgrade to Mac OS Sierra, I took the plunge the other day. Bear that in mind as I take you through on a journey of mild technology pain. Prologue: backupįirst of all, remember how people always told you to take backups, rather as you were advised to wear sunscreen? Well, they were right. Ever wondered what the worst error message you could encounter might be? This ranks pretty highly.

Recover history in openoffice mac