Skipping CellChangeTimes in Notebooks

Questions
,
1

Hi,

Is there a way to save a Notebook without writing the CellChangeTimes information?

Thanks,
Carlos Felippa

2

It looks like there’s an option for turning off CellChangeTimes tracking called TrackCellChangeTimes. I found a brief overview of how to change it here:

3

Do you want to remove the CellChangeTimes information? Or do you want to save a copy of the notebook with the CellChangeTImes information removed but with the original notebook retaining the information?

In the first case you can execute the following in the notebook and then save the notebook:

Module[{nb},
 nb = EvaluationNotebook[];
 SelectionMove[nb, All, Notebook];
 SetOptions[NotebookSelection[nb], CellChangeTimes -> {}];
 ]

In the second case you can do this with a copy of the notebook. Or you can get more sophisticated and create a temporary version of the notebook in which the CellChangeTimes are removed and which is then saved, leaving the original notebook untouched.

4

Actually I would like to remove ANY trace of CellChangeTimes FOREVER from any Notebook
I use under v9. I do not want that to stay as CellChangeTimes->{}.

Reason: I exchange Notebooks with overseas colleagues and their students, some of whom use older versions
such as 5.0. Loading the v9 NB triggers error messages, one per cell. Some of the NB have over 200 cells,
so editing that option out by hand is tiresome.

To maintain plot compatibility with older versions I use $VersionNumber If statements. But AFAIK that NB option
cannot be controlled that way.