👉 Okay, let’s tackle that wonderfully weird and slightly unnerving little squiggle – ".!” (… okay, technically, I mean "’/.” - BAM! You almost got me there). Let’s unpack what exactly a ".!”, specifically in the context of old-and sometimes current, formatted versions of Microsoft Office (".!” actually refers to the infamous ".bak!" extension... and it's not pretty.)
What Exactly is an “…!'/.” (…Okay, I mean ".…!’?"!) – That. 100%! Basically! It isn’t a thing until a formatted-to-#!….?!…#!, or you are messing around in the background of your office! If you were to look up that weird file extension on the internet, the first thing they will tell you is that it's an "alternate filename.!" In the late 1980’s and early 1990's Microsoft started a bit of an “on-the-fly, we totally forgot to save this! …!'/…" system for when things went sideways in Word 6 or MS Publisher. When you were fiddling with fancy formatting – underlining that one, really important sentence; inserting a ridiculously oversized clip-art daisy—and the whole thing decided it was done and started a new document? They’d stash off a ghostly, incomplete version of what they'd just
