Re: Prevent Word view-only from munching mod date?

From: henryn (henryn_at_zzzspacebbs.com)
Date: 09/16/04 

Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 20:35:47 -0700

Matt:

Thank for your response on this thread:

in article 1gk61gm.1ydr348s6z5mcN%matt@tidbits.com, matt neuburg at
matt@tidbits.com wrote on 9/15/04 5:47 PM:

> henryn <henryn@zzzspacebbs.com> wrote:
>
>> How do I prevent Word form changing a file modification date for a file that
>> I view and don't in any way modify?
>
> I've never seen such a thing.

Lucky you!

> If the red dot at the upper left of the window does not get a black dot in the
> middle of it, the document is not dirty, and it has not been modified, and
> when you close it, the modified date will not be changed.

Agreed.

Would you agree that if anything changed about the document, even page set
up -- but file position with respect to scrolling, you _will see a "Do you
want to save changes to this document before closing?" dialog?

I would think so. I have my arguments with page setup constituting a
document change, but I'll let those go.

Well, I have about 7 documents in my archive folder that I know I didn't
change, yet these show mod dates in the recent month, during the period I've
been referring to the archive, being very careful to make no changes. Even
better... I would have seen the "Do you want to save changes to this
document before closing?" dialog and been able to recover.

Fortunately I periodically mirror this HDD to another, so I have a pretty
solid backup of this folder, and I've restored it.

I made a test copy in another folder of one of the files that had showed up
as being modified today.

Unfortunately, after playing around with this file for about 30 minutes, I
can't get it to exhibit the problem.

OK, I'll be doing some research in the archives during the next week. If I
notice that the mod date of a file changes again, how do I prove I didn't
actually change something AND missed seeing the "Do you want to save changes
to this document before closing?" dialog AND hit a CR to accept the changes?

I think all I can do is assert that this happens It just isn't easy to
prove or instrument. Even before and after screen shots would be pretty
unconvincing.

Ultimately, I guess I should lock these files, but I don't know of a bulk
lock technique -- there are 159 files in this folder. I suppose someone's
got an AppleScript somewhere....or I could mess with Unix permissions -- not
sure how get-info "locked" corresponds to unix-speak, though.

Sometimes it is hard to remember what the original task was.

>
>> Should it be possible for any change to be made to the file system without a
>> dialog? In this case, when I hit the close button, if Word is going to
>> change something --anything at all-- I think it should warn me "Do you want
>> to save changes to this document before closing?" and give me a chance to
>> say "Don't Save."
>
> You are quite right. If the document is being modified without your
> being notified, something is very wrong. This sounds like the behavior
> of a macro virus - it would modify your document as it is opened and
> then immediately save it, so that you would not know of the change. m.

Thanks for the suggestion.

No macros shown in this file, and Preferences-->Security-->Warn before
opening a file that contains macros _is_ enabled.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Henry

henryn@zzzspacebbs.com remove 'zzz'