The editing time property in Word documents is unreliable.
It has little, if anything, to do with the time spent actually working on a document. If long, it will refer to all of the time the document was open even if the person opening it was watching videos or TV or sleeping. If the person uses SaveAs, it may show up with an editing time of seconds even though all that was done was changing the name of the document.
In my opinion as a lawyer, these properties have no forensic value.
This article is posted because I've repeated this information a number of times, as have others. I wanted a place to point to and to update as further information comes in.
For example:
Here are two sets of properties for the same document before and after a Save As. The document is my own work and has been a work in progress for more than ten years.
Before:
.
After:
.
The date statistics and number of revisions are fantasies, essentially. They were created by the developers of Word for internal use in their programming. I don't think they ever expected them to be used to check the veracity of work. Note also that both say the document was printed about three years before it was created! The created date may well be related, in your case to when the document was uploaded or downloaded. This document has been used for more than ten years.
By the way, at the time those statistics were taken the document had more than 160 pages. The first dialog shows 15 pages and the second 146. Note that the statistics in both for number of paragraphs, words and characters is unchanged. For more examples, see my response in this thread: My editing time is 0.
My post there has later versions of the advanced properties statistics dialog for the same file.
Resources:
