Critical Update for Microsoft Office 2008

On Jun 26, 2008, at 11:46 AM, Dana S. Nau wrote:

> Does anyone know whether this update fixes the PowerPoint 2008 bug
> where it changes the modification date of every .ppt file every time
> you open the file, regardless of whether you modify the file or
> not? It was because of this problem that I reverted to Microsoft
> Office 2004 -- and that's where I intend to stay until the problem
> is fixed.

I have the update installed and tried this. PowerPoint 12.1.1 still
changes the modified date upon opening .ppt files. However, it does
not change the modified date of files in the current .pptx format. I
suspect this is not a bug but is working as designed. Maybe if a lot
of people complained they'd change it but I'm not optimistic.

You can prevent it from changing the last modified date by making the
file Read Only. You can do this by changing the file's file
permissions to remove Write access or by checking the "Locked"
checkbox in the Get Info window for the file. Doing this on a per-file
basis would be tedious so doing it en masse is helpful.

Running the following command in Terminal will find all files in your
Documents folder ending with "ppt" (not case sensitive) and check the
"Locked" box for each. If you have PowerPoint files that don't have a
filename extension, you would need to use something that can read the
old Type and Creator codes.

find ~/Documents -iname '*.ppt' -exec chflags uchg {} \;

Alternately, you could move away from relying on the modified date
metadata and storing the value some other way. It appears easy to
create an Automator script to find all the files (Find Finder Items
whose extension is equal to 'ppt') then append their current
modification date to the filename (Rename Finder Items, Add Date or
Time, Date/Time Modified. I suggest using Year Month Day with Dash
separators and leading zeros). When you actually changed files, you
would need to manually update the date information in the filename.

These aren't solutions, just workarounds. If you know you're going to
eventually upgrade to PowerPoint 2008, it's better to have a plan
sooner rather than later. If cross-platform support isn't an issue,
you could also consider switching to Keynote, I understand its
PowerPoint import is pretty good.

Curtis Wilcox wrote:

> Alternately, you could move away from relying on the modified date
> metadata and storing the value some other way. It appears easy to
> create an Automator script to find all the files (Find Finder Items
> whose extension is equal to 'ppt') then append their current
> modification date to the filename (Rename Finder Items, Add Date or
> Time, Date/Time Modified. I suggest using Year Month Day with Dash
> separators and leading zeros). When you actually changed files, you
> would need to manually update the date information in the filename.

You could save the files to a folder with a folder action (folderorgX)
attached. This does not work on external drives.

<http://homepage.mac.com/dougeverly/folderorg.html>

Use FolderOrgX (freeware) to organize your backup files info folder by date.
FolderOrg is an AppleScript Folder Action that organizes files and folders
by moving them into dated subfolders. This is helpful in keeping files and
folders organized by the day they were added, not created or modified.

I use this for my downloads and screen snaps folder. It really helps me
because these folders can really get full and hard to manage.

--
Diane

This problem must be a bug since MS Word and Excel from MS Office 2008 (old and new formats alike) do not change the Date Modified.

Very good idea to set the permissions to ReadOnly! That essentially solves the problem.

Jonas Tegenfeldt Lund University