Microsoft Office documents typically contain a great amount of metadata, some of which can be instrumental in computer forensics. While e-Discovery and computer forensics software can handle extracting and displaying most of the metadata, I found that a crucial piece of information is usually not extracted: Microsoft Word last 10 authors — also known as Word save history.
Certain versions of Microsoft Word such as Word 8.0 (Word 97) through Word 10.0 (Word 2002) store the names of the last 10 people who edited the document as well as the file locations. This information is not displayed to the end user through the Microsoft Word user interface, and according to the Microsoft Support website, this is an automatic feature that cannot be disabled.