If you come across a message that Google Sheets can’t save your sheets and you need to revert to an earlier version, but even the earlier version can’t save, don’t bother doing any of these suggested steps. Clearing cookies won’t help. Disabling extensions won’t help.
Instead, try this (as counterintuitive as it seems): copy and paste your Google Sheets cells into a new Excel workbook. Save the Excel workbook and upload it to Google Drive. Open it with Google Sheets. Save that sheet. Delete your old, non-working sheet.
11 responses to “Fix for Google Sheets error message: “Can’t save your changes. Copy any recent changes, then revert to an earlier revision””
This works! Thanks Alan. saved a lot of my time.
My GoogleDocs worksheet has images in it, so it won’t transfer when I copy and paste.
Well, this is a workaround, not a fix, so you may have to put a little more work into the workaround. Copy and paste the text from your Google Sheet and then, after you upload your Excel workbook to Google Drive, try to manually re-insert the images again.
doesn’t help me because I am working on someone else’s sheet.
It froze when I tried to copy and when I came back it deleted the recent changes. Can I still retrieve it?
I mean, I’m not Google, so I can’t tell you for sure what’s retrievable and what’s not. Probably the best thing to do would be to look through the version history: File > Version history > See version history.
Good luck!
Still working! thanks for the info.
The only solution that really works! thanks
[…] seems there may be a workaround by exporting to Excel and then reimporting into Google Sheets (see here), but as this spreadsheet uses some Google Sheets only features that would have to be set up again […]
[…] seems there may be a workaround by exporting to Excel and then reimporting into Google Sheets (see here), but as this spreadsheet uses some Google Sheets only features that would have to be set up again […]
Google meant that, create a New Worksheet (not whole workbook) and format as it was, and rename it as it was, and delete the older currupt one. It worked for me!!