Weird Question re: saving docs w/ weird names

Some co-workers have experienced some strange happenings regarding some Word documents and possible corruption.

These documents were opened, changes made, but then saving provided a winword.exe error and the file would not save (it just created a .tmp file.

Here's the strange part. They have been naming these files like:

x.x.name.this.that.doc

Now, I thought that MS wouldn't allow you to use symbols like the ". ". I thought that it reads anything past the first "." as the extension. Our help desk confirmed that this is why the file was ******* up.

However, my co-workers have been using this naming convention for quite some time and have accumulated over 300 documents.

Does anyone have a thought about this? Someone mentioned that they thought MS reads the extension from right to left, and so this couldn't be the problem with the documents.

(It is possible that someone has corrupted the files without knowing - several users not very adept with computers have recently touched these files!!!)

Thanks!

 

Hi Anakalia
I'm sorry I've got no answer for you, but do have a link to a site that's very good with everything Office related?

Daizy

 

Hi Anakalia

in the old days of DOS (pre Windows9x) the dot character was indeed illegal as part of a file name, but no more - there are still some characters that you aren't allowed to use but the dot (and comma) are OK..

can't use them as part of a disk label though...

your post intrigued me so a tried a few names (word97, windows98) and managed to save OK with some silly names like
"do.dots.work" which gave "do.dots.work.doc ";
"do.dots.work.doc" (in the name box) gave "do.dots.work.doc "; and to be really stupid i tried putting
"do.dots.work.doc.doc "; as name, gave "do.dots.work.doc.doc "; all without winword.exe throwing a wobbly

which would seem to mean that the parsing works right_to_left as you say...

but unfortunately doesn't really give you much positive. Hope you manage to sort it OK.

Hugh

PS even in old DOS days you could "confuse the enemy" by fudging a space into a filename with <Alt>0255 - which worked to a degree - and caused no end of chaos - as could not do anything to the file like renaming or printing or deleting it, short of using wildcards, if you didn't know the trick...