Does anybody 'Hide extensions for known file types'?
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There are few things as dull as installing Windows. I'm in the update stage and having downloaded the updates, it's installing them - 141 of them. That's just Windows, once I get Office on there and Visual Studio there'll be all the service packs as it morphs from 'Windows' to 'Microsoft' update. In my set-up routine I always go into file explorer and make all the file extensions show up as I'm simply lost without them. Also hidden files, but this time I'm going to leave system files hidden. So question - does anybody hide file extensions or does everybody turn them back on?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
For many people, who don't have to do the ridiculously complicated things that we do with the computer itself (they just do ridiculously complicated things with the stuff they store on the computer), the file-type icon is enough, especially if they use large icons. If a file has an "unknown" file type, they probably have no need or desire to open it anyway, but the ones they need or want to use are easy to recognise. Of course, that all breaks down if you do something like "Save as RTF" in Word. For me, it's a right royal pain in the @rse. If I'm working on a locked-down machine that uses the convention, I'll find a way to unlock it up. And don't get me started on SharePoint, where you have to jump through hoops to display extensions.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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There are few things as dull as installing Windows. I'm in the update stage and having downloaded the updates, it's installing them - 141 of them. That's just Windows, once I get Office on there and Visual Studio there'll be all the service packs as it morphs from 'Windows' to 'Microsoft' update. In my set-up routine I always go into file explorer and make all the file extensions show up as I'm simply lost without them. Also hidden files, but this time I'm going to leave system files hidden. So question - does anybody hide file extensions or does everybody turn them back on?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
I never hide them as invariably a csv icon will look similar to an xlsx,xls etc. icon. If I need to code a file path I need to know the entire name of the file, including the extension. I can't see any need to ever hide file extensions. When it comes to helping users, invariably the extensions will be hidden which takes up extra time when I am trying to find out what type of file it is.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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I couldn't agree more. One of the very first things I do as well!
djj55: Nice but may have a permission problem Pete O'Hanlon: He has my permission to run it.
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There are few things as dull as installing Windows. I'm in the update stage and having downloaded the updates, it's installing them - 141 of them. That's just Windows, once I get Office on there and Visual Studio there'll be all the service packs as it morphs from 'Windows' to 'Microsoft' update. In my set-up routine I always go into file explorer and make all the file extensions show up as I'm simply lost without them. Also hidden files, but this time I'm going to leave system files hidden. So question - does anybody hide file extensions or does everybody turn them back on?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Well, I always disable that option but I understand why its enabled by default. As others have said, non-techies don't really care about files and they don't want to care. They do care about the "report for the boss", or the "invoice for customer x", or the "budget for 2013". And those were the names they typed when they saved their work, so suddendly the "report for the boss" becoming "report for the boss.docx" or "budget for 2013" becoming "budget for 2013.xlsx" *can* be confusing. Also, your average user never starts an application from anywhere but either the start menu (and that's the reason taking it away in Windows 8 is such a big problem) or a shortcut in the desktop or the taskbar. Or, and this happens a lot, from one of the many actual files they keep on the desktop. So they never *ever* have to tell "excel.exe" from "excel.exe.manifest", and even if they did, "excel" (as it shows when the extensions are hidden) would have an icon they associate with, well, Excel, and "excel.exe" would not. Not confusing at all.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
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I guess they think that having a dot then three letters is a bit cryptic for ordinary people, but you need something to say what it is. It's strange people's unwillingness to change. When Windows 95 came out I was wary of long file names (more than 8 characters) and avoided them for a while, because it was just 'not right'. My brain had adapted to fitting everything into 8 characters and that's what I wanted. Stockholm syndrome of the operating system variety, perhaps.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Rob Philpott wrote:
dot then three letters
as in web.config, default.html, ...
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." Alan Kay.
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Turning that "feature" off is one of the first things I do on any Windows install. I find it incredibly irritating having to rely in an icon in explorer to determine the file type. I don't know who in their right mind decided "Let's hide file extensions, that seems a great idea!".
.-. |o,o| ,| \_\\=/\_ .-""-. ||/\_/\_\\\_\\ /\[\] \_ \_\\ |\_/|(\_)|\\\\ \_|\_o\_LII|\_ \\.\_./// / | ==== | \\ |\\\_/|"\` |\_| ==== |\_| |\_|\_| ||" || || |-|-| ||LI o || |\_|\_| ||'----'|| /\_/ \\\_\\ /\_\_| |\_\_\\I think that feature was added so that idiots don't actually rename the file with the extension and then complain about why something is failing. I think with Win7, the rename option is smart enough to highlight just the filename, without the extension, so hiding the extension is no longer as dangerous. Renaming extensions with the extension hidden has always been problematic for users with a bit/lot more common sense.
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There are few things as dull as installing Windows. I'm in the update stage and having downloaded the updates, it's installing them - 141 of them. That's just Windows, once I get Office on there and Visual Studio there'll be all the service packs as it morphs from 'Windows' to 'Microsoft' update. In my set-up routine I always go into file explorer and make all the file extensions show up as I'm simply lost without them. Also hidden files, but this time I'm going to leave system files hidden. So question - does anybody hide file extensions or does everybody turn them back on?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
We were forced to have them off, some big app was so shoddily coded that it wouldn't work if extensions where on. Plus with Office's stupid similar icons and file descriptions that are identical till about the 30th character... And we suffer regularly because it...mainly because XP has then no f'ing way to find out what the extension is. The properties dialog hides it too, if they'd just added that simple fix, at least some issues would go away. I turn it on everywhere I can.
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There are few things as dull as installing Windows. I'm in the update stage and having downloaded the updates, it's installing them - 141 of them. That's just Windows, once I get Office on there and Visual Studio there'll be all the service packs as it morphs from 'Windows' to 'Microsoft' update. In my set-up routine I always go into file explorer and make all the file extensions show up as I'm simply lost without them. Also hidden files, but this time I'm going to leave system files hidden. So question - does anybody hide file extensions or does everybody turn them back on?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
I typically leave them hidden until such time as I need to do something that requires them to be visible.
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Kyudos wrote:
it is just part of the file name.
I was talking about people who have no real understanding of how filenames are structured, or why. They just understand documents and folders.
Use the best guess
Richard MacCutchan wrote:
I was talking about people who have no real understanding of how filenames are structured, or why. They just understand documents and folders.
I would presume that this would include a lot of people that don't care either. I have seen people who had no interest in computers but didn't have any problem figuring out what extensions were. And they would still need to figure out the icons.
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There are few things as dull as installing Windows. I'm in the update stage and having downloaded the updates, it's installing them - 141 of them. That's just Windows, once I get Office on there and Visual Studio there'll be all the service packs as it morphs from 'Windows' to 'Microsoft' update. In my set-up routine I always go into file explorer and make all the file extensions show up as I'm simply lost without them. Also hidden files, but this time I'm going to leave system files hidden. So question - does anybody hide file extensions or does everybody turn them back on?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
I turn them on whenever/wherever I find them turned off - whatever the type of user. I suspect that hiding them was an attempt by Microsoft to emulate Apple's "This is a Word document, whatever you try calling it I will open it with Word and nowt else". Has anyone else had the fun of editing a bat file in Notepad (with extensions turned off) and saving it under another name??? You get foo.bat.txt - most useful.
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There are few things as dull as installing Windows. I'm in the update stage and having downloaded the updates, it's installing them - 141 of them. That's just Windows, once I get Office on there and Visual Studio there'll be all the service packs as it morphs from 'Windows' to 'Microsoft' update. In my set-up routine I always go into file explorer and make all the file extensions show up as I'm simply lost without them. Also hidden files, but this time I'm going to leave system files hidden. So question - does anybody hide file extensions or does everybody turn them back on?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
I am a developer and this has caught me out. On the clients environment, my code would check to see if the file lock.txt exists, and if so it would lock the user from doing anything. When I deployed my code, I right-clicked int the explorer, and created a new file called lock.txt. The program could not find the file. It took me a while to notice that file extensions were hidden. As soon as I disabled that, I noticed I had created a file called lock.txt.txt. I hate this feature and switch it off on every computer I work on. Pain in the a$$
** death by snoo snoo **
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I don't see how that causes any confusion - it is just part of the file name. I would think the potential to have several files in the same location with (apparently) the same name would be more confusing...
It causes confusion because you then have multiple files with "identical" names. So "Mydatabase.mdb" and "Mydatabase.ldb" both appear as "Mydatabase". Cue support call: "Click on the "Mydatabase" icon, it will open MS Access". "I did that, nothing happened..." It's a nightmare, and as above, the very first thing I do on any Windows system I work on is set it to show file extensions and hidden files.
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H.Brydon wrote:
P.S. I install and mostly use Windows File Manager on my Windows machines (instead of Explorer), which can be found here[^].
Nice! I too was an advocate and didn't use explorer until they day they got rid of file manager, but I hadn't realised it lived on in the underworld... I know what you mean about custom views too, although its usually in my MP3s that all meaningful fields disappear.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
I always contended that it was the beginning of the end for Windows when they scrapped "File Manager" and introduced "Windows Explorer". Instead of the user being in control and actively "manage" their system, all of a sudden they were lost in a maze of unknown structure and had to "explore". Up to that time I was supporting Windows 3.x users and pretty much knew the purpose and location of every one of Windows' 4000-odd files. From Win95 I was as lost as the next person and from that point stopped providing Windows support and switched to apps development.
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There are few things as dull as installing Windows. I'm in the update stage and having downloaded the updates, it's installing them - 141 of them. That's just Windows, once I get Office on there and Visual Studio there'll be all the service packs as it morphs from 'Windows' to 'Microsoft' update. In my set-up routine I always go into file explorer and make all the file extensions show up as I'm simply lost without them. Also hidden files, but this time I'm going to leave system files hidden. So question - does anybody hide file extensions or does everybody turn them back on?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
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We were forced to have them off, some big app was so shoddily coded that it wouldn't work if extensions where on. Plus with Office's stupid similar icons and file descriptions that are identical till about the 30th character... And we suffer regularly because it...mainly because XP has then no f'ing way to find out what the extension is. The properties dialog hides it too, if they'd just added that simple fix, at least some issues would go away. I turn it on everywhere I can.
In the "good old days", Office applications had names like "Word", "Excel", "Powerpoint". So when in the Start menu, you could use the keyboard to select them by just typing the first letter. Then (from Office 2003 or thereabouts) they changed the app names to "Microsoft Office Access", "Microsoft Office Excel" etc, so making single-letter selection from the start menu impossible. Don't know what bright spark came up with that "improvement" but they should have lost their job... or at least their promotion. Bet they didn't, though. If I'm using a system with Office pre-installed the next thing I do after "fixing" the hidden file extensions is to "correct" the names in the start menu so that they're useable. :-(
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I don't see how that causes any confusion - it is just part of the file name. I would think the potential to have several files in the same location with (apparently) the same name would be more confusing...
Actually I've found that "feature" to cause issues with at least one lay person (the financial director). After he's made is Excel file, he renamed it in explorer. Then coundn't find it to open again. The reason being he removed the xls extension in the rename process because part of the name he gave it was split using a period. Yes windows does pop that warning dialog. But lay users tend to just click OK if something pops up :wtf: For myself though, I want to see the damned extension thankyou very much! Especially since I use several programs which open the same file types. E.g. I prefer editing Docx in Word, but Doc in Libre Office (I find its consistency in formating old Doc files better). Many other reasons too.
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There are few things as dull as installing Windows. I'm in the update stage and having downloaded the updates, it's installing them - 141 of them. That's just Windows, once I get Office on there and Visual Studio there'll be all the service packs as it morphs from 'Windows' to 'Microsoft' update. In my set-up routine I always go into file explorer and make all the file extensions show up as I'm simply lost without them. Also hidden files, but this time I'm going to leave system files hidden. So question - does anybody hide file extensions or does everybody turn them back on?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
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I turn them on. Can't live without 'em. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
How could more information add to the confusion? It is like giving someone the name of a street but hiding the house number. Sure you could find the house eventually by knocking on every door and seeing if the right person answers.
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Turning that "feature" off is one of the first things I do on any Windows install. I find it incredibly irritating having to rely in an icon in explorer to determine the file type. I don't know who in their right mind decided "Let's hide file extensions, that seems a great idea!".
.-. |o,o| ,| \_\\=/\_ .-""-. ||/\_/\_\\\_\\ /\[\] \_ \_\\ |\_/|(\_)|\\\\ \_|\_o\_LII|\_ \\.\_./// / | ==== | \\ |\\\_/|"\` |\_| ==== |\_| |\_|\_| ||" || || |-|-| ||LI o || |\_|\_| ||'----'|| /\_/ \\\_\\ /\_\_| |\_\_\\Agree 100%, that is one of the many STUPID things MS has done to try to dumb down Windows, or actually I believe it's MS trying to copy features in Macs... even though they seem to be copying the bad features. Why hide extensions? Why hide menus? Why hide all my menu's and buttons in IE just so the web page can take up the whole screen? Wasn't there an option for full screen already, THAT NOBODY USED??? They must have thought, gee here is a feature nobody uses, so why don't we make it the default view and shove it down everybody's throat so our commercials can look pretty. I was a long time user of IE only, til the last few versions came out, now it's goodbye and good riddance to IE. Don't even get me started on the train wreck that is Windows 8... PATHETIC!!! Another thing I just thought of, why do they have the "More" and "Less" buttons on file copy dialogs??? What is "copying c:\??? to d:\???" just too much info for people to handle, that you have to hide it by default or it might cause somebody's brain to explode or something? Reminds me of some web pages that have "more", then you click it and there is ONE additional word... PATHETIC.
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There are few things as dull as installing Windows. I'm in the update stage and having downloaded the updates, it's installing them - 141 of them. That's just Windows, once I get Office on there and Visual Studio there'll be all the service packs as it morphs from 'Windows' to 'Microsoft' update. In my set-up routine I always go into file explorer and make all the file extensions show up as I'm simply lost without them. Also hidden files, but this time I'm going to leave system files hidden. So question - does anybody hide file extensions or does everybody turn them back on?
Regards, Rob Philpott.