From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

Creating files, rules, and limitations

From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Creating files, rules, and limitations

“

- I just started working on this worksheet so the first thing I need to do is to save. Control s to save. The file must be dubbed with a name. Short descriptive names are best, and this is the proper folder. So I'll just type the name here, Finances 4/30/21. Here Office is being helpful. The message tells me that the file name is invalid. It contains characters you can't put into a file name and the culprit here is the forward slash. All hope isn't lost however, if I change that forward slash to say a hyphen which is a valid character, you see that the save button is enabled and I can go ahead and save the file using this name. File names in Windows can contain letters, numbers, spaces and a smattering of symbols. Upper and lower case are treated the same for the most part. Though, this case insensitivity is not true for all computer platforms. These are the symbols forbidden in a file name. Asterisk and question mark are used as file name wildcards. Forward slash, back slash, colon and the double quote are used to delineate path names. Greater than, less than and the vertical bar character are used for input, output, redirection and other things. Files stored on the cloud may have further limitations including the comma plus other characters. The cloud hosting service may alert you to any file naming violations or it may automatically insert substitute characters. Characters that are often mistaken to be forbidden include the space, underline, parentheses, comma and a special case is the period which is okay in a file name. Periods are used, however, to mark the file name extension. The single and double periods are reserved for use as path shortcuts. Therefore, I recommend you avoid using periods in a file name. These legacy device names should also be avoided as file names. A filename can be one character long and up to 260 characters in length. Don't be verbose. Short and sweet is best when it comes to naming files. You should also consider a files path name when naming a file. The path name consists of the current folder, as well as the parent folders, all the way up to the drive letter. It starts with a file name and extension then all the folders all the way up to the drive letter. Each of these folders is separated by the backslash character. If you're collaborating, keep your files organized. The full path name helps you recognize a file's purpose. Just as much as a descriptive file name can do to help you know what's inside.

Contents