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Hello,
I am based at a university which has just provided a requirement we must label all documents with a security/ sensitivity flag (Microsoft feature). The issue I have is if a student shares with me their essay I download it apply the security tag and it appears the underlying metadata is reset so editing time in word becomes 0min. If we expect plagarism we check authorship and editing time alongwith a number of other approaches. Is there anywhere we can find out the original editing time?
Many thanks
Lizzie
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Answer recommended by moderator
The "editing time" statistic is meaningless, anyway, as it tracks only the time the document was open, not when it was actively being worked on. But you could check the document properties before applying the security tag.
As Suzanne told you, this "statistic" has no value for your intended purpose. At best, it reflects the time that a document was open on a computer. That does not mean that there was anyone at the keyboard nor that the document was the top window. The person could have been sleeping or gaming with the document open.
Chances are good it reset to 0 when you saved it on your computer.
See my article about this: https://addbalance.com/articles/The%20lack%20of%20forensic%20value%20of%20the%20document%20'statistics'%20kept%20and%20reported%20by%20Microsoft%20Word.htm
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This answer has been deleted due to a violation of our Code of Conduct. The answer was manually reported or identified through automated detection before action was taken. Please refer to our Code of Conduct for more information.
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