workbook naming convention

[bill]

Friends,

A company I am consulting to has many Excel .xls files on
the network, but each user is using his own workbook
naming convention. It's confusing.

What is a generally accepted "best practices" format for
naming .xls Excel workbook files?

Thanks for you help.

Bill M.

 

[Chip Pearson]

Bill,

There is no universal "best practice" for naming workbooks. It
all depends on what the workbooks contain. In some cases, for
example, it might be best to use a date format of "yyyy_mm_dd" as
a suffix for the workbook name. In other cases, it might be
useful to use the user's initials as a prefix. It all depends on
what is in the workbooks, and how all the workbooks in question
relate to one another. One consideration that you might want to
keep in mind is to name the workbooks in a manner that the names
will sort in a meaningful order.


--
Cordially,
Chip Pearson
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Pearson Software Consulting, LLC
www.cpearson.com

 

[Bill Morgan]

Chip,

Thanks for your response. I think we'll incorporate both
those suggestions + a short section describing subject
matter. Who-What-When.

We already pretty much know the "how" and we'll leave
the "why" up to another department (upstairs) ...

Thanks again ...

b.

 

[Chip Pearson]

Bill,

As I should have mentioned in my previous post, the most
important thing about having a standard naming convention is
getting users to stick to it.


--
Cordially,
Chip Pearson
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Pearson Software Consulting, LLC
www.cpearson.com

 

[Guest]

Chip,

Got it. That's the hard part - I am hoping that the naming
convention's usefulness will be incentive enough.

Thanks,

b.