Microsoft Word documents “Date Modified” date update with no modifications

[dmt43]

I am a relatively new Mac user, lifelong Windows user. I have a Macbook M2 running Sonoma 14.3 though I have noticed this behavior since I started using the Mac last August. I use Microsoft 365 - Outlook Word, Excel….when I go into a Word document to view it and I make no changes, the ”Date Modified” date updates to the current date. That messes me up, bc I use date last modified date to see when the last time I changed a document and now - I’ve lost that feature. Any ideas on why this is and how I might be able to make it work as it should?

When I view documents in “Finder” they show: Name, Date Modified, Size, Kind, Date Created (but that date is wrong too, old documents show a creation date of when I moved the documents over from the Windows computer). Thanks!

 

[ipaqrat]

In the file management apps -- Mac Finder and Windows Explorer -- create and mod date are provided by the journaling file systems, APFS and NTFS, respectively. The file management apps won't ordinarily display MS Word's internal document properties. Moving a file into a new file system stamps the correct new creation date.

As for the mod date update behavior, know that Word is extremely chatty with itself. Office files contain an internal database way in excess of users' content. Even movement of the cursor is a change to the file, in support of it's "Resume where you left off" feature. Just a theory, here, but if auto-save is somehow engaged, the file might be saving almost non-stop (I really HATE that aspect of using Office with Sharepoint.)

IIRC, auto-save requires either onedrive sync, or storing the doc from sharepoint. On my machine, at the moment, I made sure I'm using strictly local storage - no onedrive, no sharepoint, no autosave, and I cannot reproduce the instant mod update issue.

 

[dmt43]

Thank you for your informative response, I learned something new! I forgot to mention the documents are on OneDrive. So, I will check auto save setting and see what happens. I was not aware of how chatty Word is ; )