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First of all, I’ve been working with the 20-20 program for 21+ years. I support team members at more than 325 stores; each with at least two computers for designing with 20-20. Why is it that 20-20 Design cannot save a design that has a period in the name of it as a .kit file? For example, a file named ‘Smith.Donna.kit’ saves as ‘Smith’ or ‘Smith.bak’. Upon trying to open the design, a message displays that states the file is either not in the correct format or it is corrupted. It doesn’t matter if you try to open as a design, bak, or inserting it into 20-20, it will not open. Incremental save will save correctly before the file has been named but that will generally only open with walls and a couple cabinets.
New team members are trained using a tutorial and naming a design without using periods or other special characters is at the top of the list. But it does happen.
I understand that 20-20 has several programs on the market, but can’t the 20-20 program ‘know’ which program is being used upon saving a design and save it without corrupting it?
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I’m right there with you Dawn! I’ve been using 20-20 for 12 years and this is a very frustrating issue. I have seen the “corrupt” issue happen even when we don’t use a period. I’ve heard it can also be an issue if the file name is simply too long. Has anyone else had this isssue?
So it is better to use spaces, no spaces, underscore, hyphens? One long word? I just don’t know what to use anymore in fear that I will anger the 20-20 gods. 😛
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Hi Dawn,
I believe that this is not a 2020 specific error. In saving any file, the text after the period signifies the type of file it is, and what kind of program can open it. For example in Microsoft Word, the extension is either .doc or .docx. For Adobe, the extension is .pdf. So changing the end of the file is pretty much asking for it to be corrupted. If you save the file as Smith.Donna, your computer is now going to try and find the program “Donna” to open the file with, but since it doesn’t exist, it leads to the file being “un-readable”. This will happen with any file, give it a try in a different one and you will see what I mean.
I recommend renaming the file with .kit or .bak so it can be readable again to 2020. Also when saving, you can use pretty much any keys except /, \, or . as those are coded to be file and folder identifiers.
Hope this helps!
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OK, one of the major reasons I found for corruptions is being close to running out of memory at the time you save. I also try and get my designers to do incremental saves (change the name slightly) after every major change.
Another reason I found for corruptions was due to using a cloud drive – for some reason (& Google Backup & Sync in particular), saving to a cloud drive resulted in a much higher number of corrupted files. I ended up writing a little script that starts 2020 Design and then after you quit, it runs a command to copy any new/changed drawings to a cloud drive.
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Mike – Thank you for your insight. However, there are no memory issues and all designs are saved to an onsite server. Years ago, the designs were saved directly onto the PC that it was designed on. Regardless of where it was saved, there has always been this problem with designs corrupting when a period is used in the name of the design. I am only concerned about the period being used. Nothing else.
I have attached an example of an issue just reported to me this morning. It was initially named as ‘Stewart.CardellDesigner’ and the .bak file is named Stewart.bak. (Date-10/05/19) There have been times when a file named with a period will actually open if it is opened using the ‘Recent’ list, but not always. For the most part, the period in the name is not caught until attempts are made to find and or open the .kit or .bak file at a later date. We’ve tried renaming the design from Explorer or another program, but that doesn’t work either.
As I mentioned before, I am not new to the 20-20 Design program. But if there is a ‘trick’ that anyone has that will actually work, I am all ears. I’ve brought the issue to 20-20 Tech Support but I have never received any type of response.
Most responders on this site are very knowledgeable and I am hoping someone can help or help beat on 20-20’s door to do something about this. I am very surprised that no one has reported this as an issue yet in here. But with well over 1,000 team members designing for the company I work for, there is bound to be this design naming issue.
Thank you!
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Hi Dawn,
Apologies but I must admit I haven’t come across the period issue but I don’t tend to use periods except before the file extension – I’m an old IT guy so my file naming conventions generally avoid ‘special characters’ and being that I have to train the Designers up, this means they probably do what I do.
This should be a relatively easy fix for 2020 though!
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Hey Dawn,
You seem to know the work arounds so I’ll give you one more thing to try. In file explorer turn on the File Name Extensions in the view tab. This should help but remember, no matter what, if you save any file with a period in the file name and 4 or fewer characters after the period Windows assumes you are entering a file type.
Hope that helps.
Neil
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Hi Neil,
Thank you for your response. Are you saying there is no way that 20-20 Design cannot determine that when a file is saved while designing, it cannot force the .kit extension? That’s really all I wanted to know. I understand the reasoning behind not using periods in the naming convention, but unfortunately, there is bound to be at least one in the 1,000+ team members that use the program. I have made sure everyone knows of the problem in our 20-20 Help Tips for the team members, but it does happen.
Thanks again, Neil!
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