Hello Everyone,



After hours of Google searches I hope someone can help me with what I think is a simple question.

Can you predefine a file names in Word, Excel and PPT?

Basically, my company, like so many others has a huge internal file systems...and like most, ours needs to be totally reorganize every year because people can't (or dont want to) respect the file naming rules.

Our rules are as follows: "year-month_File_name_xxxxx_xxxxx..."

or

"2013-11_Sales-report_for_client"

As easy as it is to follow, people don’t and it’s a huge issue. So does MS in all its winsome and glory have a feature that will block or reject all entries that done follow the preset format? Granted they can still include the wrong information but at least it will be in the correct format!

Thank you all!!

Jason

Whilst it would be possible to write a macro for each application (i.e. one for Word, another for Excel, another for PowerPoint, etc) to pre-populate the application 'Save As' dialogues with a string such as you require, it would be much more difficult to prevent a user ignoring the rules and giving the file an inappropriate name (e.g. saving what should be "2013-11_Sales-report_for_client" as "2014-01_Sales-report_for_client" or "2012-12_Sales-report_for_client"). After all, just as you might usually want the files to include the current year & month, I'm sure there are cases where the current year & month aren't appropriate.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]