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Absolute Beginners IV: What’s in a name?

Carefully naming files in Windows will help you keep track of your precious information. (Updated October 2002)

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Topic links:

a digital filing cabinet

name that file

windows long filenames

a disciplined approach

file extensions

unique filenames

disks, paths & filenames

give it a try

 

Everything you work with on your computer is stored in the form of files. A letter you write in your word processor; an image you scan in and edit using a graphics program; a database containing thousands of inventory items; an MP3 music file you’ve downloaded from the Internet. They’re all stored on your hard disk – or other storage medium, such as a Zip disk – as files. Even programs are stored as files. Windows itself, for instance, consists of thousands of files, with each file contributing its own little bit to the general functioning of your computer. It’s not uncommon for a PC with Windows and a few applications installed to have as many as 50,000 files stored on the hard disk.

This mass of files can easily disintegrate into a mess of files if you don’t know how to whip them into line.

A digital filing cabinet

Windows provides a simple mechanism for organising files. It lets you create folders, in which you can store related files.

The terminology is reminiscent of an office filing cabinet, and that’s a pretty fair analogy. You can think of your hard disk as the filing cabinet; the folders as file folders to which you attach labels so you can quickly locate the correct one; and the files themselves as documents containing text, graphics and other information. Of course, the types of documents you can store on a computer are more varied than anything you can shove into a filing cabinet. As well as bills, correspondence, receipts, brochures and photos, for example, you can also store such things as video clips, music tracks and programs.

Windows goes one step further than the average filing cabinet, and lets you store folders within folders. The added level of organisation provided by these sub-folders makes it remarkably easy to keep track of files even when your hard disk is crammed with documents and programs.

Name that file

A nicely organised folder structure provides one step towards organising your files effectively. Equally important is the need to name your files and folders in clearly identifiable ways, so you – and your software – can locate the correct file.

Each file on your computer has a filename which uniquely identifies it. In pre-Windows times, when people used DOS as their operating system (the acronym stands for Disk Operating System), filenames were limited to a name of up to eight characters followed by a full stop (that’s a period for my US readers) followed by an extension of up to three characters. If you ever see the term 8.3 filename this is what it refers to.

The extension usually indicates the type of file: DOC for documents, BMP for pictures in bitmap format, XLS for Excel spreadsheets, and so on. Valid DOS filenames include names such as Budget01.xls, Let2mum.doc, Cameo.ps. Naming files so they were easily identified under DOS’s restrictive 8.3 rule required ingenuity and the creation of a set of naming conventions.

Windows’ long filenames

Windows is much more liberal with filenames. It lets you use up to 215 characters, including spaces.

There are a few characters that you can’t use in Windows’ filenames. They are:

/ \ : * ? " < > |

That last symbol is called ‘pipe’ and you’ll usually find it on your keyboard directly above the backslash (\) key. Apart from those excluded characters, you have free rein when naming your files.

Such liberality makes it much easier to create meaningful filenames, but also has its drawbacks. First, you should try to avoid very long filenames (say over about 65 characters) because many programs choke on ultra long filenames.

Second, it’s easy to waffle when using such long filenames, instead of using a disciplined approach. So try to establish a consistent approach to naming files while taking advantage of the ability to be descriptive.

A disciplined approach

For example, say you have two Excel spreadsheet files, one containing a household budget and the other a budget for your business. Instead of naming the files:

Budget for the Jones family household for the year 2001.xls

Jones Enterprises 2001 business budget.xls

try something a little more precise, thus:

Jones household budget 2001.xls

Jones Enterprises budget 2001.xls

The consistency will not only help you locate files, it will also help keep files sorted in a logical order, which is handy when you’re searching for a file in a File Open dialog box.

A combination of consistency, precision and descriptiveness when naming your files will make them easy to locate later.

File extensions

Note that each of the example filenames above includes a three-character file extension, a hangover from DOS days. In Windows, while you’re not limited to a three-character extension, the characters after the full stop are still, by convention, used to indicate the filetype – whether it’s a WordPerfect document, an Excel Spreadsheet, a video clip, or some other file. Under Windows, the names of filetypes mostly contain three characters (largely inherited from their DOS predecessors), but you’ll find some with one or two (such as WP for some word processing documents) and some with four or more (such as HTML for some Web documents).

Unfortunately, when it created Windows 95, Microsoft deemed file extensions too befuddling for users and so hid them from view.

Although designed to make things easier, this ploy really leads to more confusion for beginners rather than less, so my advice to you is to unhide those extensions. Here’s how, in Windows XP:

1. Click Start -> My Computer.

2. In the My Computer window, select Folder Options from the Tools Menu.

3. In the Folder Options dialog box, click the View tab at the top.

4. In the list of settings, locate the option Hide Extensions For Known File Types and, if it’s ticked (checked), remove the tick/checkmark by clicking the option.

5. Click OK and close the My Computer window.

In Windows 9x or Windows Me:

1. Double-click My Computer.

2. In the My Computer window, select Folder Options from the Tools Menu (if you’re using Windows 95 or Windows 98, use Options on the View Menu).

3. In the Folder Options dialog box, click the View tab at the top.

4. In the list of settings, locate the option Hide File Extensions For Known File Types and, if it’s ticked (checked), remove the tick/checkmark by clicking the option. (In Windows 95, the option is labelled Hide MS-DOS File Extensions For File Types That Are Registered.)

5. Click OK and close the My Computer window.

You’ll find almost every program you use appends a default file extension to files you create. For example, Microsoft Word adds the extension .doc to documents you create (unless you specify otherwise). Because this is done automatically, you usually don’t have to bother about file extensions when naming files – simply provide a descriptive filename and let the program add the correct extension. Just make sure you don’t end your filename with a full stop. If you do so, the program will think you want a blank extension and won’t add the correct filetype extension.

If you have an ’orphan’ file (that is, one for which you can’t find the program that created it), you can often identify the file by its extension. Use the File Extension Search Engine to check a list of over 1600 file extensions.

File extensions are more than merely convention. Windows associates different file extensions with different programs, and automatically opens the document using the associated program. For example, when you double-click a file with the extension .xls, Windows recognises it as an Excel spreadsheet and opens it using that program (provided, of course, you have a copy of Excel installed on your computer).

Unique filenames

Earlier I said that each file has a name which uniquely identifies it. You may be wondering why it is, then, that you can have a file called Jumbo.jpg sitting on your Desktop and have a file with the same name sitting in your My Documents folder. How does Windows tell which Jumbo.jpg is which?

The answer is that Windows does exactly what you do to distinguish the two files: it notes the different locations. One is on the Desktop; the other is in the My Documents folder. Clearly they’re not the same file (although they may be copies of the same file).

What Windows does, in fact, is identify files using three pieces of information: the name of the disk on which they reside, the folder path, and the filename.

Disks, paths and filenames

Disks are identified by a drive letter. On most computers, the floppy drive is called A: (note the colon is part of the drive name), the hard disk is C:, the CD-ROM is D:. If your computer has additional drives these identifiers may differ a little, but this is the usual setup.

(What happened to B:? In earlier times many computers had two floppy disks and frequently no hard disk; the first floppy was A: and the second was B:.)

A folder path is the list of folders and sub-folders you must traverse to find a file. The folder path of a file you place in the Correspondence sub-folder within the My Documents folder is:

\My Documents\Correspondence\

The backslashes are used to separate each element in the path.

(Actually, in Windows XP, the My Documents folder is a sub-folder within other folders, so the path is more likely to look something like this:

\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\Correspondence

where username is your Windows log on name. For simplicity’s sake and because the location differs depending on how your computer is set up, we’ll stick with the shorter pathname.)

So, a full filename takes the form:

driveletter:\folderpath\filename

Thus the full filename of the elephant photo we have in our My Documents folder consists of:

C:\My Documents\Jumbo.jpg

while the full filename of the elephant photo on the Desktop is:

C:\Windows\Desktop\Jumbo.jpg

So, despite initial appearances, the two filenames are unique. If you make a copy of Jumbo.jpg on a floppy, it’s unique filename will be A:\Jumbo.jpg.

By the way, don’t worry about the case of the filenames – I’ve used mixed case to make the names more readable, but Windows ignores the case when determining filenames (in the jargon, Windows is not case sensitive when it comes to filenames.) You’ll also notice that the Desktop, which you think of as your screen, is really just another sub-folder, stored within the Windows folder.

Give it a try

You can see how Windows deals with filenames for yourself by trying this:

1. Right-click a vacant spot on the Desktop and, from the pop-up menu, choose New -> Text Document. Windows will create an empty text file called New Text Document.txt.

2. Repeat the procedure. Note how Windows calls the second document New Text Document (2).txt to give it a unique name.

3. Rename the second document by right-clicking it and choosing Rename from the pop-up menu. Try to replace the existing name with the name New Text Document.txt. When you press Enter, Windows won’t let you and warns you that a file already exists with that name.

4. Drag New Text Document.txt into the My Documents folder to move it there.

5. Now try renaming the second document on your Desktop New Text Document.txt. This time, you’ll succeed because there’s no conflicting filename.

© 2002,  Rose Vines

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