I originally posted this on LinkedIn, but thought it would be a good addition for the blog as well.

Good morning everyone. I wanted to touch base on naming conventions. We use names in everything we do to uniquely identify or categorize the things we work with. In CAD we have a number of areas where we can do better in our naming efforts. This is not a hard rule or standard, but more of a practice I suggest you adopt when naming things.

What kind of things?

  • Layers
  • Blocks
  • Folders
  • Filenames (drawings, models, Excel files, Word documents…)
  • Tabs (inside Excel and other documents, like Layouts in AutoCAD)
  • And just about anything else

Back in the days of DOS we were restricted to filenames of 8 characters and a 3-character extension separated by a period — something like thisfile.ext. Now imagine today’s content being limited to that structure.

Today’s operating systems (discussing Windows) allow a large number of characters (255) for filenames. This does not include the folder structure path, but long paths can still hit limits and begin to restrict the actual filename length. Have you ever tried to archive, copy, or move a project and had the computer prompt you with “filename invalid” or truncated? Imagine archiving a project with 12,000+ files and finding that even 5% (600+) need shortened names before the archive will succeed. What files have data links or dependencies on those filenames and locations? What breaks when you rename files or folders? What good is the archive at that point?

Hopefully that presents at least one good reason to develop better naming habits.

Some practical guidelines:

  1. Avoid special characters that cause problems in paths, scripts, and archives:
    • Commas, single or double quotes, and apostrophes ' , ` "
    • Characters above the number keys ! @ # $ % ^ & *
    • Tilde and accents ~ `
    • Greater than / less than < >
    • Question mark ?
    • Vertical bar and slashes | / \
    • Curly or square brackets { } [ ]
  2. Avoid spaces — prefer CamelCase (capitalize the first letter of each word, no spaces):
    • ThisIsCamelCase
    • DrawingForPiping
    • MyFile
    • MySpecialTab
  3. Dashes and underscores are OK, but can become distracting if over-used.
  4. Avoid redundant data — if the file is a .dwg, adding “Drawing” to the name is usually unnecessary.
  5. Consider sorting
    • If you want to sort by year, put the year first: 20190220 (Year-Month-Day) instead of 02202019.
    • Sequential numbering: files 1–9 sort cleanly, but adding 10 breaks the order. Prefix with zeros so every sequence has the same width (e.g. 001, 002 … 010 if you expect fewer than 1,000 items).
  6. Avoid names that are too long.

Something else to consider is being consistent in your naming systems. Consistency helps you find, sort, and share files far more efficiently.