Naming Conventions, Updated: What Actually Works in 2026

The old best-practice list is showing its age. Here’s what to use instead — and the one rule that matters more than all the others combined.

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me to write them an “organization-wide nam

ing convention,” I could fund a small team to do nothing but fix file names all day.

It’s the number one request I get — from clients, from students in my classes, from colleagues who corner me at conferences. “Can you suggest a naming convention?” “We want something consistent. Can you build it?” And I get it. The way a document is named sits at the very heart of whether anyone can ever find it again — especially in organizations without an electronic document repository where metadata can do the heavy lifting.

Here’s the thing: the advice we’ve all been giving for years is starting to show its age.

You’ve seen the standard list. I’ve given this list. You’ve probably given it too:

• Don’t use symbols.

• Put the date at the beginning, formatted YYYYMMDD.

• Keep names short.

• Avoid spaces — or use _ or - instead.

• Avoid acronyms.

• Number your files to create an order.

• Use ALL CAPS for important files and folders.

Some of that is still solid. A lot of it isn’t — or at least, isn’t universally true anymore. Best practices vary wildly depending on whether you’re in SharePoint or a shared drive, whether you’re naming a file or a folder, whether that document ends up hyperlinked on a public website, and a host of other things I’ll get into below.

So I updated the list. And I put a hard cap on how long it is — because the number one reason naming conventions fail isn’t that they’re wrong. It’s that they’re so restrictive, and so numerous, that people quietly abandon them and go back to Final_v2_REAL_FINAL.docx. (You know it happens.)

One note before we dig in: I’m not touching folder structure today. That’s a different post for a different day. This is strictly about naming the things themselves.

The Updated Rules

Best Practice	Why It Matters	Exception
Name it what it is. The title of the document should equal the name of the file.	People search for documents based on what they’re actually called — not a shortened, nonsense version. This one habit fixes more retrieval problems than any other.	If the title is too long for the character limit, use everything before the colon — and put the full title in a metadata field if you have one.
Spaces are allowed.* Use a single space between words. Don’t run everything together, and don’t substitute symbols for a space.	Search functions often struggle without spaces. The old warnings about spaces breaking things were mostly about URLs and shell scripts.**	If a file is buried four folders deep, or the name is already long, skipping spaces can help. Public-facing website? Let the file name skip spaces, but make sure the hyperlinked display text has them.
Date formats can differ. Consider just using the year — or skipping the date entirely.	Sometimes the day and month don’t matter. For final documents, official studies, or long-retention records, the year alone is plenty.	If you need files to sort by date, use YYYY-MM-DD at the beginning of the name. And for the love of all that is holy, use dashes (2026-06-21, not 20260621).
Stop naming files in ALL CAPS.	Nobody can read a name when every word looks identical. It’s visual noise, not emphasis.	None. Just stop.
Symbols and numbers are okay — sometimes. Decide whether you’ll spell out “and” and numerals, then apply it consistently.	Search can fall short and sort order gets weird when spelling and formatting drift. But folders sometimes need to sort by number, not alphabetically.	My personal rule: numbers in folder names, words in file names — and symbols avoided in both.
No misspellings. If your system doesn’t spell-check, draft the name in Word first.	I can’t tell you how often documents go missing over typos. They’re the silent killer of retrieval.	None. Spell it right the first time.

If I Had to Pick Just One

If I could only hand you one of these and walk away, it would be rule number one: name it what it is.

Records management shouldn’t be a guessing game. It needs to be easy, straightforward, efficient, and successful — and “name it what it is” is the single cheapest, highest-impact habit an organization can build. Everything else is optimization on top of that foundation.

But three things have to be true for any naming convention to work:

1. Make a decision.

2. Share it. Train on it. Repeat yourself often.

3. Build in flexibility.

That last one matters more than people want to admit. A name that works beautifully in a shared drive can break in a web URL. A convention that sorts perfectly one folder deep can turn unreadable at four folders deep. Think about where the document lives, how it’s searched, what it might get linked to, and whether it ever touches a script or code — then write rules that can accommodate all of it. Skip that step, and you’ll build something airtight that nobody follows.

A Couple of Notes Before You Go

*On spaces

My stance on spaces directly contradicts NARA Bulletin 2015-04. I’m aware. That bulletin is more than a decade old at this point, and the technology has moved on considerably. Maybe I can inspire an update.

**On separators, because the nuance matters

• Spaces: best for SharePoint and OneDrive search.

• Underscores: acceptable in SharePoint, and good for scripting contexts.

• Hyphens: avoid in SharePoint — they break search tokenization.

• Spaces: still risky for web-hosted or public files, scripting, and deep folder paths.

In other words: the “right” separator depends entirely on where the file lives and what it has to do.

That’s it. Short list. Flexible rules. Actionable tomorrow.

I’d love to hear from you — what did I miss? What do you disagree with? Drop a comment below and let’s make this list better together.