saving comma changes to ^j

Question

why is it when i save a document as "name, name" word changes it to "name^J name"? 

also when using an & it changes that to ^O

Answer 1

okay. did what the article said than reopened a document that was in the skydrive and resaved it using the comma and putting it in my document folder and the comma stuck.

so what does this mean? i can not use skydrive?

Hi Kathy,

Thank you again for the response.

Office Web apps does not support some of the characters.

The names for the file created using Office Web apps cannot contain the following characters:

~ # % & * { } | \ : " < > ? /

You may also refer to the following thread link which talks about similar issue with OneNote sections having the same character change when a comma is used:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office\_2010-onenote/when-i-do-the-sync-the-program-changes-commas-into/ba724fc7-1709-4920-a28b-556c3f2e4ba9

Hope this information is helpful.

Thank you.

Answer 2

I know this is a fairly old unsolved thread (the so-called solution that was provided by a Microsoft support engineer was not a solution although it was marked as "accepted"), but I finally managed to solve it and I wanted to share the solution I found.

Actually, the solution I am proposing here is solving three commonly reported issues about OneDrive: (1) characters like "," or "&" in the file names being replaced by "^J" and "^O" respectively; (2) the location of the OneDrive folder in "C:\Users\UserName\OneDrive" creates longer paths that eventually causes a problem when the total path reaches 260 characters or more; and (3) in some older applications, the OneDrive folder is not directly accessible and one has to navigate from the root of C: through Users, etc. in order to reach the OneDrive folder (at least when "Save documents to OneDrive by default" is not enabled in PC settings).

In order to solve all three above issues, one simply has to map a substitute (SUBST) drive for the OneDrive folder (or any deeper folder for that matter). To make the solution seamless and persistent, one should also force the SUBST mapping to be persistent across reboots by adding the following string value to the registry using RegEdit:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]

"O Drive"="subst O: "C:\Users\UserName\OneDrive""

making sure to replace UserName with the appropriate user name. Also, another letter can be used in case the O: drive is already taken. Lastly, if entering the command manually in the registry, do not double the backslashes and do not escape the quotation marks with the backslash in that case (in other words, simply enter the string as: subst O: "C:\Users\UserName\OneDrive").

I have been opening from and saving documents to my O: drive (instead of OneDrive) for a few days now and I did not experience any problem. My files are still perfectly accessible online or on my other devices and I do not experience the above issues anymore. It did some resynchronisation for a while (I am not sure why, but I had over 1.3 GB of data in my OneDrive), but after that period, everything was fine.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

thanks for trying to help. it is defaulted to US English. have only tried in word but will try now in excel.... yes it does the same thing in excel also.

Hi Kathy,

Thank you for the reply.

I would need more details to assist you:

What is language used to write the document?

Are you saving the document to a shared location?

Is the file being saved using Office Web app?

Does this issue occur only while naming a file or does comma (,) change to ^j, (&) changes to ^O while you create a document with these characters also?

Are you able to create any other files apart from Office documents with comma's in the file name?

Are you using a desktop or laptop?

If it’s a laptop, then ensure the Fn (function) key is not turned on.

Let us know the details to assist you.

Answer 4

thanks for trying to help. it is defaulted to US English. have only tried in word but will try now in excel.... yes it does the same thing in excel also.

Answer 5

Hi Kathy,

I would need more details to assist you better:

Does this issue occur while typing the name for the document or after saving the document?

Does this issue occur only while saving Word documents or all Office application files?

What is the Keyboard language set for Windows?

You may change the Regional and Keyboard Language to US English and check if the issue occurs. You may refer to the following link for steps on how to change the Keyboard language on Windows 8:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/change-keyboard-layout

Provide more details and let us know if the suggestion provided was helpful.