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
This was very helpful. The Modified Date is very important to my workflow and I can confirm this is the OneDrive feature that changes it almost every time you open a document to view it. Thank you.
Quick recap for posterity: go to OneDrive Settings > Office tab > under File collaboration > uncheck "Use Office applications to sync Office files that I open"
Maybe for many, this is worth it to stop the inane Date Modified changes, but I see MS is starting to provide other options. Specifically, I notice that some files can now be set to open in Read Only mode, with a click to flip to Edit. This is an extra step for when you do want to edit the file, but as a single click for an "Enable editing" button that's right there at the top of the window, it's worth it for me to preserve the full benefits of live editing and protect the Date Modified from changing on open. Unfortunately, and this is what I'm currently seeking, I don't see how to set this as the default for all Office files, or at least per application (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). Anyone know if this is possible and how?
- I have clarified why this is happening for me. I have Windows 10 Office 365 Family. I have Auto Save turned off in Word and Excel. When I open files that were created prior to my migration to One Drive, the files are automatically saved as soon as I open them, updating the Date Modified. This is really annoying and unfortunately doesn't seem to be fixable. When I open files that were created or previously saved after my One Drive migration, they are not automatically saved and the Date Modified works as desired.
- Long before OneDrive came around, Office was updating the modified date on opened files because background processes such as proofing, language tagging etc are changing the document metadata.
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.
- This has nothing to do with OneDrive .
If you have background services running in your Office documents like language autodetect, spellcheck etc etc then these will update invisible tags in your document and thus modify the document. This was true before OneDrive (or its predecessors) existed.
