Showing recent documents

[Howard Brazee]

Most of my applications that edit applications will show recents when I right-click on that document. Microsoft Word & Excel used to do so until I got rid of my subscription, installed LibreOffice, and then later bought a cheaper Microsoft Office.

I have Word, Excel, BBedit, & LibreOffice in my dock, and Find Recent works for all of those except for the Office apps, which find nothing. I'm wondering if this has to do with both LibreOffice and Office recognizing the same kind of documents.

Any ideas why this happens?

 

[MilkandGin]

Can you clarify your question? Recents is an application-level feature, meaning that if you open Microsoft Word, click file, and click 'open recents,' it will show you the ten most-recent documents opened in that application. But it sounds like you're talking about document versioning.

If you open a document in word and click file, then click 'browse version history,' it should show you your prior document versions. In my case, that option is grayed out because I regularly use Onyx to clean up that system-level stuff. If you use any type of CleanMyMac X, CCleaner, Onyx, etc., unless you specifically tell it not to do so, it will destroy prior document versions and Microsoft Office will gray out the option. No prior versions are available to display.

If your're able to pull up prior versions for a given document in LibreOffice but want to edit prior versions in Microsoft Office, a temporary work around is to load the document in LibreOffice, revert to a past version, save the file, and then open it in Microsoft Office. You can also use 'save as' to create two separate files, one with the prior version edits and one with the current version edits.

 

[Howard Brazee]

If I have LibreOffice, BBEdit, & Word on my dock, and all three are not active, I can right click on LibreOffice or BBEdit and see a bunch of recent documents. If I right click Word or Excel, I don't see any recent documents. But I do see an entry "Show Recents", but I don't see any recent documents. If I click on "Show Recents", I get "No Available Windows". Once I open Word, I can right click on it, move my cursor to "Open Recent", and then see a bunch of recent documents.

 

[MilkandGin]

Ahh... There's no telling. When I right click the Word icon in my dock, it shows recent documents with all documents populated. When it's an issue solely with that one app, it's probably a quirk with that app. Microsoft may be able to give you more information. Wish I could help. (I use Pages, because I don't need to write doctoral theses or legal briefs. Pages has everything shy of that.)

 

[MacsBug]

I just checked Word on my Mac and it also did not have any recents showing.in the dock icon if i right clicked on the icon.

I opened Word, which I have set to open the template Gallery. I opened the top item in the list there and then the recents showed up again under the dock icon.

I usually never open a document this way, so I don't know if doing this will work for you, but it just fixed the issue for me.

 

[MilkandGin]

It works on mine, but Microsoft Office is my default application for .doc and .docx files, even though I rarely ever use it. I use Open As and then select Pages to open documents.

 

[Howard Brazee]

I just double-clicked on a .docx and it opened using Word. A year ago, it would have opened in LibreOffice, which I tried when I dropped my Office subscription.

 

[MilkandGin]

Well, still... I think the issue here is that recent documents are showing, just not for that specific program. It could be a setting in the app itself, so I would recommend inquiring with Microsoft and then reporting back. I'd be curious too. My assumption would be that only default applications show recents (or applications last used to open specific files). If you do not use Word to edit documents, it would make sense that no recent documents show. But from what you're saying here, Microsoft Office is your default editor and you do use it. So, I'd ask Microsoft.

 

[MilkandGin]

One thing you may want to try is downloading a program called Deeper from Titanium-Software. Titanium creates several free applications for macOS maintenance that are fantastic. Deeper is a program that modifies different system options that aren't natively available in the macOS GUI. To modify many of them, you would have to go into terminal and wrote complicated commands like "defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.mouse MouseHorizontalScroll -bool NO". One of the options in Deeper is to show recent documents in the file menu of applications, which should be on by default. I believe that applies, also, to right clicking applications in the dock.

If you toggle that option, it should overwrite any settings or glitches that are preventing Word from providing that same functionality.

See https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/deeper.html.

P.S., you can also easily change the number of recent documents stored and displayed.