Excel file modification date

[Guest]

In Excel 2002 SP3 on Win XP, the workbook's file modification date changes to
the current date and time as soon as the Excel workbook is opened, even if
there are no changes applied to the file. If you close the workbook without
changing any of its contents, the file modification date reverts back to the
original value. Is there any way for the file modification date to remain
unchanged until afte the Excel workbook has been modified? Does this behavior
occur in newer versions of Excel?

 

[Myrna Larson]

It has been that way for as long as I can remember and I don't think it's
changed in XL2003 (which is the only newer version). No, there's no way to
change that behavior.

 

[Jerry W. Lewis]

The only way I know of to avoid this is to open the file Read Only.
Since there is not a Read Only option in the file open dialog, this
means that you either must use a VBA command to open, or else set the
read only property of the file (right click on file from Windows
Explorer) before you open it.

I don't know how long Myrna can remember ;-) but I recall that Excel has
worked this way at least since Excel 5. I have found it problematic,
because the date-time stamp gets permanently changed, despite no changes
to the file, if there is any kind of abnormal termination of Excel
(power failure, crash, etc.) before the file is closed.

Jerry

 

[Dave Peterson]

In earlier versions (through xl2k, IIRC (xl97 for sure)), you could right click
on the filename in the File|open dialog and choose "open read-only".

In newer (all???) versions, you can select the file and then click on the
dropdown arrow on the Open button in the File|Open dialog and choose "open
read-only".

 

[Myrna Larson]

I can remember the first Windows version of Excel, 2.1d, in 1987. Those were
"DOS days", so Excel came with a "run-time" version of Windows.

My computer was an 8mHz IBM-AT with 512k of memory and a 20 meg hard drive.
Excel was such a drudge speed-wise that I uninstalled it and went back to
Multiplan <g>.

 

[Guest]

I am glad everyone has a memory of this issue. Is there a good reason for
this unusual behavior? Maybe Microsoft could fix this in a future release of
Excel. Other office programs don't seem to exhibit this behavior. Thanks
everyone for their responses.

GRosner