2007 Office release includes a number of audit reports that enable administrators to view the contents of the audit logs and sort, filter, and manipulate the data in them to analyze how that data is used within a site collection. Audit reports enable organizations to use the raw data in audit logs to construct a meaningful picture of what has or hasn't happened to data. The reports can be readily saved in a useful format for review.

The auditing reports enable you to determine:

• Items that have been added to a list or library
• Documents and files that have been viewed and read
• Changes to permissions
• Changes to columns and content types
• Items that have been deleted or restored
• Items that have been copied, moved, checked in and checked out
• Search queries
• Changes to auditing

1. On the site collection home page, click Site Actions, point to Site Settings, and then click Modify All Site Settings.
2. In the Site Collection Administration section, select Audit log reports.
3. Select the type of report that you need.

   Content modifications  Reports changes to content, such as modifying, deleting and checking documents in and out

   Content type and list modifications  Reports additions, edits, and deletions to content types

   Content viewing  Reports users who have viewed content on a site

   Deletion  Reports what content has been deleted

   Run a custom report  Enables you to specify the filters for a custom report, such as limiting the report to a specific set of events, to items in a particular Web or list, to a particular date range, or to events performed by particular user

   Expiration and disposition  Reports all events related to how content is removed when it expires

   Policy modifications  Reports on events that change the information management policies on the site collection

   Auditing Settings  Reports changes to the auditing settings

   Security Settings  Reports changes to security settings, such as user/group events, and role and rights events

After you run reports on audit logs, you can use standard Microsoft Office Excel features to narrow the reports to the information you want. Some ways in which you can analyze and view the log data include:

• Filtering the audit report for a particular date range
• Sorting the audit log report
• Viewing daily retention activity
• Determining who has viewed or worked on an item and who has downloaded or copied an item
• Permission history on an item