Microsoft Sharepoint Services

Symptoms:

• When trying to close a web part from the SharePoint page, we get an error message :

 “The file is not checked out.  You must first check out this document before making changes.”

Web Parts Maintenance Page: If you have permission, you can use this page to temporarily close Web Parts or remove personal settings. For more information, contact your site administrator. 

WebPart CheckOut Error

If we go to the Web part maintenance page using “?Contents=1” at the end of the .aspx page

Getting to the Web part maintenance page

Now try to either close or delete the web part from that page, we get an error :

 “Could not complete the operation. The file is not checked out. You must check out the document before making changes.”

Web Part Check Out Error

I tired to check out the document from the IE as well as from SharePoint Designer, but we still get the same symptoms.

Work-around #1:

This workaround does not actually resolve the issue completely, but I found that out while trying to get rid of that error message. 

• Browse to the SharePoint page where you want to modify the web part. Make sure that you are logged in as the site admin or with a user account that has modify permission over the site.
• Click on Site Actions -> Edit Page.

Now you can close the specific web part that you were not able to close before.

Work-around #2

• Browse to the Reports site and click on “View All Site Content”

View All Site Content

• Browse to “Pages” under document libraries. I was working with the default.aspx page and thus, by default it is stored under the pages directory of the site. You might be working with some other pages and so basically you need to browse to the library where you have stored the .aspx page where the web part exist.
• Click on the drop down of the .aspx page and select “View Properties”