files saving as Lastname uparrow J Firstname

[Ellen512]

I'm making files in Excel for lists of authors and their books.   I'm trying to save them as Lastname, Firstname, but instead of the comma it puts an up arrow and a J.  Why, and how do I fix this?

[#2]

Some questions:

1. what version of Excel are you using?

2. have you considered using a SharePoint list instead of Excel? In many cases these lists provide much more functionality than what you get in an Excel file.

[#3]

Excel 365, sorry I thought it was tagged as that.  I'm not familiar with .SharePoint, even whether I have it.  How does it work?  And wouldn't the naming still be an issue?

[#4]

your tags were for Office 365 and Excel, (there are several different versions of Excel that can be used with Office 365).

A SharePoint list has a lot of similarities to an Excel Table, it just doesn't have all of the math, but for your purposes, you don't need that. Here are the instructions to get your started in case you are interested

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Introduction-to-lists-0A1C3ACE-DEF0-44AF-B225-CFA8D92C52D7

Some nice things about Lists are that many people can work on it at the same time, you just need a browser, and it can be exported to Excel if needed

[#5]

Well, I do have some files from my old Excel, but it's the ones that are converted or created in 365 that have the naming issue.  How would using SharePoint help with that?  I don't need to share these with anyone else, the only spreadsheet I might share hasn't had an issue, probably because the name has only letters and numbers, and it likely wouldn't work in SharePoint because it does have a lot of arithmetic in it.  It also appears this would not be free.  

[#6]

So I still don't know why a comma is being replaced by an arrow and J in workbook titles, or have any idea how to fix it.  Anyone?

[#7]

Commas used to be an unsupported character in file names and would cause this problem, but MS has made many changes and now there are only a few characters that cannot be used. The easiest fix is to not use a comma in the file name, which is what i would recommend because this cause problems with other applications.

What version of OneDrive are you using? if you still have the old OneDrive synce client (groove.exe) you could be running into the fact that it did not support commas.

These articles could be helpful

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Which-version-of-OneDrive-am-I-using-19246eae-8a51-490a-8d9...

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Invalid-file-names-and-file-types-in-OneDrive-OneDrive-for-...

Since you have Office 365, you have SharePoint and there would not be any additional charge

[#8]

Sorry, we've been having issues around here, but back to this.

It appears I have up to date OneDrive for Windows 10, so that shouldn't be the issue.  Without knowing the problem, I don't see any advantage to using SharePoint which must be different from Excel, else why would it even exist?  I could leave out the comma, I suppose, but it would make the file names confusing, and it would be annoying to change them, delete all the old files, etc.  I'd at least like to understand the problem before taking that route.