Having problem opening Pages and running Keynote in Lion

[treehorn]

All of a sudden this week, I am unable to open Pages on my Macbook Pro (roughly 3 years old) that is running Lion (which may be the problem right there).

Basically, it won't open and you get the 'spinning beach ball of death' for a very long time and then it will crash. I've gotten a crash notice report saying something along the lines of "crashed while trying to recover/reopen lost session" (unfortunately I didn't think to write down the exact wording and it hasn't happened since).

Keynote is running very slow and erratically, but that seems to be a problem that many are having thanks to the autosave feature that was added to Lion.

This has been a 'degrading' issue versus a 'problem from the start' in that Pages worked all right at the start but has been working less and less well over time, until now it has stopped working all together.

I've reinstalled it multiple times from the DVD. I've even re-purchased it from the App store in the off-chance that it would solve the problem - and it seemed to for two whole days. I've repaired permissions, I've run Lion Cache Cleaner and done a deep clean on any stray fragments that might be on my computer.

Nothing new has been installed in a long time, so it's not a conflict with a new piece of software.

I'm thinking I need to downgrade back to Snow Leopard, but if anybody has other suggestions...or has experienced the same or similar problems, I'd love to hear options.

 

[Mal]

Pages '09, or an earlier version? I'm assuming as part of that "Deep Cleaning" you mentioned that the preference and cache files were removed.

jW

 

[CylonGlitch]

There was a large patch for iWork recently, make sure you download and install that. Before that I had tons of problems, now things just work.

 

[treehorn]

It's the newest version - and as I said I even re-purchased it from the App Store yesterday just to make sure (so I would think that it would have the iWork patch included...nothing in Software Update indicated that there was anything to download at least). And yes, deep clean removed every cache (and I manually had removed preferences and repaired permissions before).

 

[BobNass]

Same problem

Keynote is running slower and slower every day. I had huge files and I thought it was the autosave function, but now I'm working with smaller files and I can type about half a sentence before I get the spinning ball.

 

[wcwirla]

There is an extensive discussion on the Keynote 5.1 / OS 10.7 issue. Essentially, the problem lies with how the AutoSave/Versions feature of OS 10.7 engages bulky embedded video files, resulting in the beach ball of doom and paralyzing presentations. The only solution thus far is to downgrade Keynote back to 5.0.5. This can only be done by downgrading iWork to 9.0.5, and you can do this if and only if you have an installation disk that is prior to iWork 9.1 or you didn't buy it from the App Store (a BIG disadvantage of the App Store!).

The downgrade procedure and the extensive discussion of this problem can be found here.

You don't need to downgrade to OS 10.6. You only need to back iWork to 9.0.5, which does not have the AutoSave/Versions feature.

I have used Keynote professionally since it first came out, and have done this procedure on my two iMacs that run OS 10.7.