Future-Proof Filenames

Date: Nov. 5, 2013    Categories: document creation

Microsoft Windows tolerates the use of various crazy punctuation characters in filenames of documents, spreadsheets, folders, etc. But you would be wise to future-proof your filenames by avoiding characters that are "illegal" in many cloud services.

The following characters should not be used in filenames:

Tilde (~) Number sign (#) Percent (%) Ampersand (&) Asterisk (*) Braces ({ }) Backslash (\) Colon (:) Angle brackets (< >) Question mark (?) Slash (/) Pipe (|) Quotation mark (")

So that leaves you with a few punctuation characters that you can use:

Hyphen (-) Underscore (_)

There are a few more that may be legal but you would still be wise to avoid:

Period (.) At sign (@) Exclamation Point (!) Caret (^) Plus (+) Comma (,) Semicolon (;) Square Brackets ([])