How to Use Long File Names to Make Your Computer Easier and More Organized

Have you ever been stuck in visitors behind an automobile with one of these custom license plates like “LUVYZ1,” and you are scratching your head for a couple of minutes to discern what on Earth it is supposed to intend?

I changed into doing that in advance these days on my way home, and it made me think of a computer tip I thought I’d share with you to make your PC more prepared and less complicated to apply. Back in the day when I first got into computers, the names of documents on your laptop have been plenty like custom automobile license plates: you had a completely restrained amount of space to call the file, and so you have been forced to provide you with bizarre abbreviations much like you notice on license plates.

I have some vintage Word files with names and “MITYLIKE.DOC,” where I had to try and describe what the record became and the eight characters I changed into to achieve this. (If you’re now not positive about what I mean by using “characters,” it’s the term that consists of letters, numbers, and punctuation.) If you are thinking, the above example is a short tale I wrote in 1990 that became stimulated using The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a conventional quick story written by James Thurber, which also made a right into a movie starring Danny Kaye. Knowing that, you could see why I named the record MITYLIKE and may also understand why I wanted to; should I’ve given it an extended and extra descriptive call?

Computer

So, what should this do with making your laptop more prepared and less complicated? You might be questioning. Well, I’ve observed over the numerous years I’ve been assisting human beings with their computers that most people do not benefit from the capacity to use descriptive file names. They’re making things more difficult for themselves as a result. This is no complaint if you’re making this PC mistake yourself, but that is why I’m penning this that will help you.

In the Nineties, the most period for report names went up plenty from the vintage eight men or woman call plus three men or woman extension for DOS or Windows PCs, and the 31 men or woman limit older Apple Mac computer systems had to 255 characters. (The “extension” is the stop element after the dot, and including.DOC is used to tell the PC what type of report it’s miles, including a Word document.)

These “long filenames” allow you to present useful & descriptive record names, which could make your life less complicated while organizing and finding documents. You can call (or rename) a record by clicking as soon as on the document’s call (no longer the icon!), pausing a moment, then clicking once more, and you must see the name get highlighted.

Note: this is *now not* similar to double-clicking the document call. This is a single click, a brief pause; then a 2D unmarried click with the left button on your mouse.

You can then write in a pleasant, long descriptive document call, including “Unnamed brief tale stimulated through “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The document”, which I’m sure you will agree, is tons less difficult to understand than “MITYLIKE.DOC”! And don’t worry about counting the letters inside the call while you are typing; your laptop might not let you find any greater than you are allowed.

I also advise you to position a date or perhaps a version range into the report name, particularly if you hold distinctive file drafts. If you try this, you may want to write the date something like 7-7-2011 in place of 7/7/2011 as the / character isn’t always allowed on Windows PCs (and I endorse this for Mac users, too, to make the name more like-minded in case you ever ship it to a Windows PC).

One remaining element is, as I noted above, the extension (together with) is there for a motive, and you need to go away with that element as-is. Many more recent computers will robotically assist you in avoiding changing a part of the document name; however, not all do now. By taking the long filenames allowed using current computer systems, you may help yourself better apprehend what a document is without problems. It may help turn up the file you are searching out if you search on your PC for the information you are desiring, that image you need to look at, and so forth.

Hopefully, these recommendations will assist you in getting more from your computer and make your existence a bit less difficult. I’ve used those hints myself for many years now and am very happy that I did. Worth Godwin is a computer train with over 15 years of assisting computer users of all tiers and has also labored for decades “inside the trenches” as a hardware and software tech, solving actual-world computer problems.

Read Previous

Speed Up Computer Tips

Read Next

A Computer Training Class Can Have Huge Benefits for All People