Unhide Your File Extensions, Be Able to Rename Files and Extension TypesHere is a little trick you may or may not know. It is possible to rename files including the file extension if your windows machine is set up properly. Say you write a HTML file in notepad and save it as my-file. It will then be named my-file.txt. It is possible to rename it as my-file.html if you can see the file extensions.On Windows, file extensions can be hidden,(and are by default), you may not SEE that you have accidently saved a file as 'Text Documents' (and that '.txt' has been added to the end of your 'page.html', resulting in 'my-page.html.txt'.) You still see only 'my-page.html' even though it's really 'my-page.html.txt'. Also, if you try to rename it, it won't work because it's not overwriting the '.txt' part and not changing the filetype. By the way, the hiding of file extensions is ALSO a way malicious crackers can get you to click on an executable virus, fooling you into thinking it's an innocent document. It is a good idea to be able to view the extensions of all files on your system. To view all extensions, open My Computer. Click the 'Tools' menu, then 'Folder Options'. In the dialog box that appears, click the 'View' tab. In the 'Advanced Settings Box', scroll down to 'Hide extensions for known file types' and click the checkbox next to it to REMOVE THE CHECKMARK. Click the 'Apply to All Folders' button near the top of the dialog. This may or may not take a few minutes. Then click the 'OK' button to close the dialog. Now, if something accidentally gets saved as the wrong filetype, resulting in another file extension automatically appended to the one you typed, you will see it and be able to rename it. To rename it all you need to do is right click on the file, select rename from the popup menu and type in your new name. Of course, a badly-named file can be renamed simply by using 'Save As' and saving it as the proper filetype, but if you can't see the file extension, you may not know that is the problem. Also, renaming is easier than opening, resaving as a new filetype, and then deleting the old version! Now with your windows machine set up like this you need to be Extra Careful when renaming files as if you change the extension on some files they will no longer work. For example, if you have an image named my-image.jpg and you rename it and remove the file type (jpg) it will no longer work until you rename it with the "jpg" extension. |
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