Join or sign in Register for your free TechRepublic membership or if you are already a member, sign in using your preferred method below. Use Your Email Use FacebookUse Linkedin

Does Office 07 recognize a combination of period and semicolon in filename?

Locked

I have a customer who is saving Word and Excel files to her computer and is placing a semicolon and period in the file name. Here are a few examples of the problem. If you name a file “1234;abccd” the file will show as “1234;abcd.docx”. If you rename the file to say “123.4;abcd” the resulting file is unrelated to Word/Excel yet it can still be opened. If you reopen and resave the same file “123.4;abcd”, the resulting file name will be “123.4.docx;abcd”.

The current version of Office we are using is SP1. This is the first time that this problem has come up and was unable to find anything on Google.

Topic

Clarifications

In reply to Does Office 07 recognize a combination of period and semicolon in filename?

Clarifications

That mostly isn’t a problem.

In reply to Does Office 07 recognize a combination of period and semicolon in filename?

That is perfectly normal behavior.

“If you name a file “1234;abccd” the file will show as “1234;abcd.docx”.”

In Office? Sure, of course, Office will append an Office document extension to the file.

“If you rename the file to say “123.4;abcd” the resulting file is unrelated to Word/Excel yet it can still be opened.”

Right. But you are renaming the file Outside of Office now. Of course it can be opened if you choose that application to open it, or open it from within the application, regardless as to what gibberish you put into the extension.

“If you reopen and resave the same file “123.4;abcd”, the resulting file name will be “123.4.docx;abcd”

That is sort of odd behavior there, but why on Earth would anyone do that? Semi-colons or not?

RE:That mostly isn’t a problem.

In reply to That mostly isn’t a problem.

“That is sort of odd behavior there, but why on Earth would anyone do that? Semi-colons or not?”

The person that is using this naming convention is wanting to name the files this way and doesnt want to change the filenames. I have suggested a change to the naming convention but the reply is that it has to be this way.

Know of any fix so that the semicolon doesnt interfere with the filename?

See Rule #1

In reply to Does Office 07 recognize a combination of period and semicolon in filename?

Rule #1: Avoid using special characters in a file name. \ / : * ? ? < > | [ ] & $ , .
The characters listed above are frequently used for specific tasks in an electronic environment. For
example, a forward slash is used to identify folder levels in Microsoft products, while Mac operating
systems use the colon. Periods are used in front of file-name extensions to denote file formats such
as .jpg and .doc; using them in a file name could result in lost files or errors.

Rule #2: Use underscores instead of periods or spaces.
As mentioned above, periods already have a specific function in a file name, which is to tell the
computer program where the file-name extension begins. Spaces are frequently translated in a Web
environment to be read as ?%20?. For example,
Naming tutorial.doc
would appear as
Naming%20tutorial.doc
There are a lot more rules, I’d like to add;

Rule #10 Never, ever save any file with the “X” extension from MS ie: .docx,.xlsx,etc.

If anyone else is ever expected to open these files, saved as you described, your user will have a problem.

[Author]

Replies