Layouts created by copying an existing layout cannot be edited
Hello,
I'm a fairly new user of ArcGIS Pro (2.3.0), still trying to get my head around some of the changes to how projects are organized internally in Pro vs. ArcMap... so bear with me if I get some of the terminology wrong 
For a project I'm currently working on, I thought I might be able to take advantage of Pro's capability to store multiple layouts in a single project. (The outputs for this project are a series of county-level maps, but with enough variation between them in terms of scale, need to show surrounding areas beyond the county boundary, insets, etc, that the Map Series feature is not really a suitable choice.)
After setting up one layout the way I wanted (title bar, legend, etc), I went to the Catalog view, opened the Project/Layouts folder, copied and pasted that layout to use as a starting point for the other layouts. But when I open the copy to start editing it, it's as if I'm looking at a static photocopy of the original layout: the contents pane is empty except for the "Layout" element, which has nothing under it when I expand it. I can click to select individual elements (map frame, legend, text box) in the view pane, but the context-sensitive menu on the top ribbon does not update to reflect my current selection. My last idea was to right-click an element in the view pane and examine its Properties menu to see if there was anything 'off' about it; but that just crashed the program, naturally.
Is this a known bug which will be fixed in a future release? Creating a blank layout and copy-pasting all of the elements from the old layout will serve as a workaround, for the time being; but is there some better way I could be going about this?
Thanks,
Andrew
Hi Bryson,
Working with a copied layout as you describe should work. I'm unaware of any outstanding issues that would prevent this workflow from working. I suspect that there may be something particular with your steps or with your project/data. More information is needed to properly diagnose. Can you contact Esri Support? They are better equipped to handle troubleshooting steps and gather bug data. They can be contacted at https://support.esri.com/en/contact-tech-support .
One possible workaround is to create a pagx file - Save a layout file—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop - and import this file back into the project.
Create the pagx file:
Import the file you created:
Hope this helps.
Tom
