Part of the information saved, is the user name of the last person that
opened the file.

Try this out.
1. Copy an Excel file in a folder that you havn't yet opened
2. Right click and open with notepad
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the info and you can see a username
4. It may or may not be yours.
5. If it isn't, close the file and re-open using excel. Make some changes
and save the file
6. Re-open with notepad and the username will have changed

This detail is also saved in Word documents

--
Saruman

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Hi,
I've tried looking for an answer for this, but came up with nothing :-(

I've noticed that when you open a XLS file in Excel and close without
saving, the file on disk is modified. You can even see the date/time
for the XLS on disk change to the current date/time when opened, but if
you don't save, Excel changes the date/time back to what it was, making
it appear as if it wasn't changed.
If you use a binary comparison tool, you can see that there are a few
bytes that get changed. If you have made the XLS file readonly, it
never gets changed.
The binary changes can cause a lot of problems, especially when using
something like version control, synchronisation or duplicate finding
programs. Even comparing a XLS file from a ZIP archive and one that was
extracted and then opened will be shown as different.

Does anyone know of a way to stop Excel from making these background
changes?
Or maybe some pointers on where I can find an answer.

Cheers, BlueMM