IT Services

The naming of files

Having a simple file naming convention is essential when dealing with a large amount of information and when you need to be able to find the specific data you want quickly and easily. Although the search facilities on many computer platforms are efficient and effective, knowing where to look in the first place will always save time.

In addition, creating a consistant naming convention from the start will ensure that you don’t need to move data later on, which can be time consuming and/or risky if involving large complex files.

What to use (and what not to use)

It is best to restrict filenames to alphanumeric characters only as other characters may not be supported on all platforms or may be reserved for use by the operating system. Avoid using spaces, underscores, periods (aside from the period used to separate the filename from the file extension) or other punctuation marks.

If you do need to separate words, use a dash character -. This improves human readability and can have additional benefits for documents placed on the web as many search engines treat words separated by dashes as discrete keywords.

Case sensitivity

File names on some platforms are case sensitive, whereas on others they are not. In order to avoid any potential problems this may cause it is best to use lowercase only when naming files and folders.

For further information, please see:

sussex.ac.uk/its/help/faq2564