In desperate need of assistance here! Is there any way to find a date when a document was last accessed IF the document was stored on a thumb drive which I can no longer access? Specifically, while in Excel 2007, I noticed a particular Excel file name still appears in the list of “recent documents”. Is there any way to get details as far as the last access date? The last access date would be very helpful to me in recovery by another method. Thx!
You can do this but it requires some expertise. I will give you some information to get you started.
The list of recent documents is stored in the registry. The registry location may differ depending on the version of Office you have. I have Office 2007 and the list of files is located at \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.2\Excel\File MRU.
Each entry in the list is preceded by two fields. The first, which looks like “[F00000000]” or “[F00000001]”, indicates whether the document is pinned.
The second field is the one you are interested in. It looks like “[T01CD8B654DF5BB00]” and is a hexadecimal representation of the time the file was last opened. Decoding this timestamp is not trivial. The following page provides information about how to decode it using Windows PowerShell. It could also be done with other programming languages or, possibly, even with Excel itself.