Modified Date Changing when only viewing?

  • Thread starter Thread starter A McGuire
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A

A McGuire

Question:
If I merely open an Excel spreadsheet, view it, and close it, why does the modified date get changed more often than not? Is this a glitch, or is there a setting I can change so this doesn't happen?

Thanks in Advance.
 
You've got a volatile function that recalculates on opening. The most
common are NOW(), TODAY(), RAND(), INDIRECT(), OFFSET(), etc.
 
Where can we locate this function? I opened excel in safe mode, which would
probably turn these off, and the modified date still changed.
 
These are worksheet functions that would appear in formulas in any cell in any
worksheet.

Starting excel in safe mode won't have any affect on these functions.

When you open the file, excel/windows modifies some of those file date/times.
So if you look at the dates when you have the workbook open, you'll see that
it's changed.

But if you close the file without saving, excel/windows should revert the dates
back.

But a long time ago, I experienced the same problem as you. I would open, close
without saving and the dates would be updated. This usually happened on files
on a server in a remote location.

The problem went away (nothing I did). I thought our IT folks may have done
something with some kind of patch to windows (WinNT at the time).

I have no idea why the problem started or why it went away.
 
Ok, with a spreadsheet that I can repeat the problem, I opened it read-only,
and the modified date changed. I then opened it again read-only and it
didn't change, only the last accessed date. What do you make of that?
 
I just opened a file readonly (xl2002 under win98).

The date modified did not change (date accessed did, though).

I don't have a guess why you got conflicting results.

How many times did you try it? (If it only happened once, then maybe it was a
glitch/bad memory (human).)
 
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