First, however, save the file-within Word-to a local hard drive, such as C. In such a case, you should check with your system administrator. If this file is being saved on a network drive, then the change could be introduced by the network operating system. This means that the change must be occurring at the operating-system level. Even if you save a file, with spaces in the name, as a Web page, Word still includes spaces it does not do encoding. Word-from all the information I can find-does not do encoding of file names to remove spaces and other Web-forbidden characters in URLs. This encoding calls for a percent sign, followed by the hex value of the forbidden character-%20 in this case. Thus, the standard allows for the "encoding" of URLs that must contain spaces and other forbidden characters. This may sound strange, but the standards accepted for the Internet indicate that URLs cannot contain spaces in them. Why is this happening? My guess is that somehow the file name is becoming "encoded" for use on the Web. 20 (hex) is the same as 32 (decimal), which is the ASCII value for a space. The percent sign indicates the start of the code, and the two digits after the percent sign indicate the hexadecimal value of the character. The %20 is actually a "code" for a space.
First, a clarification: I suspect that the actual code that is being used for spaces is %20, as in "report%20one.doc". For example, if she named the document "report one", Word would save it as "report%02one.doc". She reported that Word is putting a %02 in the document name, every place that there was a space. Barbara wrote about a problem she noticed when saving files in Word.