Time and Date on MS Access 2010 files

[Lou_Reed]

When I take my MS Access 2010 application and open it and make changes and do not save the changes it seems that when I close it leaves the current date
and time on the file, not the date the MS Access files had before I opened it. This just seems wrong. I want to know the file time and date of the latest since changes were made
and while I made changes I clearly did not save them so the original files should not have had its times and date changed.

I know this may seem to be a trivial matter, but I am concerned because I do not believe MS applications did that in the past.

Any help on this appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Respectfully,



Lou Reed

[RuralGuy]

I checked and my ac2002 (XP) does the same thing.

[Micron]

For Access files, this has been the norm for as long as I can remember. I have always thought this was stupid, so depending on the situation, I use one or more of the following tactics:
- for development work, make the date part of the file name, or
- make the date part of the folder name, and in either of these cases, just move files to my 2Bdeleted folder when they are a few versions old
- use the db properties dialog to add version notes, including the last revised date and/or version ID
What I've never bothered to do is
- create a copy of a db, open that, then delete it and leave the Windows file stamp untouched in the original, or
- in Windows Explorer (not IE), see if there are any date fields you can add to the file attributes view that suit your purpose. For this, right click on an attribute header, such as Name, and choose More... to try out additional attribute fields. Personally, I find some of these attributes to be unreliable as far as accuracy is concerned.

[CJ_London]

I think you will find that although you don't save changes, it doesn't mean there are no changes to the file. You will find the same thing can happen in excel (and probably word) - sometimes the filedate is updated, sometimes not - if you go into excel, root around a bit then close, you are still prompted to save when you exit the file. Access does not provide this option, it prompts for each object.

If you want to open the file and retain the original date, you have to open it as read only.

[Micron]

if you go into excel, root around a bit then close, you are still prompted to save when you exit the file.

It's been my experience that a workbook with internal or external data links, or certain types of formulae (certainly any cell that uses Now or Date) constitutes an update and you will get prompted without touching anything. As for Access, I never bothered to try to figure out what db property or file attribute causes this. It could very well be related to the OS and not Access at all. I didn't know that you could prevent this by opening a db as read only, but since virtually every db I created had some sort of opening code (such as a log in) that would not be possible. As long as that condition wasn't a factor, I guess you could, although you wouldn't be able to run anything that caused a change.