How To Show File Extensions In Windows 10

File extensions are useful at identifying what type of file it is. This is useful because it can prevent you from accidentally installing malware on your computer. For example, you might download a file that says “photo.jpg” and you might think it’s an image file because of the .JPG extension.

However, the real file type could be hidden and when you enable extensions to be shown, it might end up looking like “photo.jpg.exe”, meaning it is actually an executable file like a program and not an image like you thought. Also, you might run into some instances where an extension is unknown to you, so by finding out what it is, you can do a search online to get a better understanding of it and whether or not it is safe to be opened.

One of the reasons why Microsoft might have hidden extensions is to prevent users from accidentally renaming it and causing issues with the file. For example, if you have a .EXE file and you decide to rename it to a .JPG file, you could, but then it would cause problems when loading because you can’t magically transform an application into an image just like that.

For the most part, it is a good idea to leave extensions alone, but there are times when changing it manually can be useful. For example, you might be coding a website in a .TXT file, but then changing it to a .HTML file would allow browsers to recognize the code and load the website correctly.

It can also be used to fix incorrectly named files, like if someone sent you an image file and somehow it can’t be opened, you could try renaming the extension to other formats to see if it works.