Looks like Microsoft broke a pretty serious promise it first made in March of 1999: to remove the function from Office 2000 that uniquely identifies every file.

In a letter from Yusuf Mehdi, Director of Windows Marketing at Microsoft, he promises that:

"The forthcoming release of Office 2000 will not include the ability to insert unique identifier in documents."

Unfortunately the Office 97 Unique Identifier Patch and Office 97 Unique Identifier Removal Tool. are no longer available. But thanks to Brewster Khale's Wayback Machine, I can get a complete index of snapshots from when it existed since 1999.

Using the wayback machine, I was able to locate the last released version of the Office 97 Unique Identifier Patch. An updated version for Office 2000 doesn't seem to ever have been made available. I'm not sure if the Office 97 patch works with later versions of Office (or even if this patch works, for that matter, because I haven't tested it -- just linking to it FYI :-)

For more information, check out:

Microsoft Office 97 and 2000 Have A Dirty Little Secret

Windows 98 Knows Who You Are

Microsoft Attaches an ID to all Office Documents!