Forum Discussion
OneDrive date modified without changing the file
- This is because of AutoSave in the office clients. They continually save as your view them and they will make changes unfortunately sometimes by just looking at them. The only option you really have is to uncheck the option in your OneDrive client so the files don't open directly with office but open locally. It's sort of explained in this article, but this tick box should keep the files opening the old way and not using the auto save functionality.
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/use-office-applications-to-sync-office-files-that-i-open-8a409b0c-ebe1-4bfa-a08e-998389a9d823?ui=en-US&rs=en-001&ad=US
Mike Williams , the only field that changed on Open (i.e., w/o making actual changes to file contents) pre-OneDrive was the Accessed field, NOT the Modified field. Even renaming a file doesn't change its Modified date. This was true even before Windows and long, long before OneDrive. Modified field would ONLY change if you edited and saved the file. That's why, back then, there were both Accessed and Modified date fields, both separate from the Created field.
MS has made a lot of progress on this problem since they first rolled out this change with OneDrive. At least now it's pretty easy to set files not to open in an Autosave state by default. It's still not perfect and requires behavioral change by users (if there's a template document that doesn't use DOTX, then user must know to Save As immediately before making any changes, not as a final step, otherwise his/her changes have become part of the template), and WORST, if a user does change a file by accident, there is no way to undo the change to the Modified date (short of restoring from a separate back-up). Even if you use the Version Control feature of OneDrive to revert to a prior version (which is great except for how it mangles the Modified date), it still sets the Modified date to be the point at which you restored the old version, or at least it did at my last check a few months ago.
- Good test. I tried doing the exact same thing. But after I copy the file to OneDrive, when I open the document the quick-access toolbar flashes "Saving" and then "Saved" and then the Date Modified is updated even though I don't manually choose to save the document. Then if I open it a 2nd time it doesn't get saved and Date Modified is not changed. It is just the first opening. There must be some setting in my OneDrive configuration that is causing this. I did not have this problem when my work computer was transitioned to OneDrive.
While I agree that MS did not give enough care to protecting Modified Date in OneDrive (I too use it as a form of version checking and to find recently edited files, and it's way too easy to accidentally make a change and lose the real Modified date forever), I tried and was not able to reproduce the problem you described:
I created a new Word document on a local drive (not on OneDrive). I made changes and saved it, confirmed the Modified Date reflected the time of the changes. Then I opened it a few minutes later without saving any changes and only the Accessed time stamp changed in file Properties, not Modified.
Then, I copied the file to OneDrive. Opened it in Word again by double-clicking from Explorer in the OneDrive folder. I had not turned off Autosave, so it was even set to Autosave, which will provide the most aggressive updates to the Modified value. I moved the cursor around in the Word document and made various selections, but didn't change anything. Then, I closed the file and checked the results.
The file's Created time and date showed the time I created it on OneDrive (not the original creation date), which is how all MS OS's have treated Created since the DOS days -- always reflects the time it was added to a new volume/drive. The Accessed time showed the time when I last used the file. But the Modified date still showed the time stamp of the last actual changes to the file before I moved it to OneDrive.- This is all fine, but I can guarantee that this issue is happening for me right now. I transitioned to OneDrive three days ago. Any files that I have created or saved since the transition work as expected. The Date Modified does not get updated if I open and close them without saving. But if I open files that were last saved prior to the transition, the message in the quick-access toolbar flashes "Saving" and then "Saved" and they automatically are saved and the Date Modified is updated. I have AutoSave turned off in both Word and Excel and I also have the option deselected to "Autosave files stored in the cloud by default". My files are all set to "Always keep on this device", and I am accessing them through Windows Explorer in the local Excel and Word apps (not the browser-based versions). These are all simple files without special automatic fields such as date fields in them.
- I do agree - since OneDrive, dates (preservation, accuracy, management generally) have been given short shrift by Microsoft.
