I just noticed something very strange when opening an Excel document that is in Excel 97-2003 format. This is the file system before I open the file: Then I open the file using Excel 2007. I do nothing to the file. It is opened in compatibility mode. The file system now looks like this: The last modified date changed! As strange as that is, it gets even stranger. Now if I close Excel, I don't get any warnings and the file system now looks like this: I kid you not! That is a new screenshot, not a...

I recently saw a post on the Visual Business Intelligence blog about representing 360 data points. The discussion in the forum was interesting as people demonstrated ways to represent these data points on a single image. I wanted to see what I could come up with. Representing information in effective ways is a good skill for the forensic analyst. I also wanted to try out the conditional formatting feature of Excel 2007 to see what it was capable of. First step was to download the data. Here is what the spreadsheet looks like: Looking at some of the other...