FINDING WHO CHANGED DOC

[sean]

Hi I am the help desk of a small network, i preform a
nightly backup of everything but yesterday a major excel
sheet had a lot of changes made and no one is owning up to
it, only ten people have write access to it before i
prform the back up i have been asked to find out who made
these changes (and i want to find out for myself)

any help would be great thanks

sean

 

[Mark Weinreb]

Hi I am the help desk of a small network, i preform a
nightly backup of everything but yesterday a major excel
sheet had a lot of changes made and no one is owning up to
it, only ten people have write access to it before i
prform the back up i have been asked to find out who made
these changes (and i want to find out for myself)

any help would be great thanks

sean

Excel has a "track changes" option under the Tools menu item (at least it is
for Excel 2002). However, if it hasn't been turned on, you're out of luck.
You could always turn it on for next time.

As always, type "track changes" into Excel's help for more information.

 

[JW]

LOOK AT THE FILE PROPERTIES - STATISTICS - 'LAST SAVED BY'

 

[Rob Schneider]

Hi I am the help desk of a small network, i preform a
nightly backup of everything but yesterday a major excel
sheet had a lot of changes made and no one is owning up to
it, only ten people have write access to it before i
prform the back up i have been asked to find out who made
these changes (and i want to find out for myself)

any help would be great thanks

sean

With Explorer, right-mouse click on file, and view Properities, then tab
"summary" which will show file properties as written by Excel. It
will show last saved by based on the Excel user name ... not the network
user. The user controls this information. If the person wanted to cover
up their changes, or blame someone else, they can easily forge this
information. So consider it as a "clue", not "proof".

I'm not sure what the stakes are here. Since reputations of 10 people
involved, I'm assuming stakes are high. Be careful of conclusions.

Meantime, consider using a more secure check in/out process for managing
files like this so that you can always know who made changes, easily
identify those changes, and easily roll back to previous versions. This
is not a business process that is met by simple backups. It's a
business process around change management and control. May be time to
use such a beast in your company.