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.
