I'm a recent Mac switcher, so bear with me. Not being able to see the full filenames of files on the desktop is driving me insane.

I'm taking a course online and my professor sends all our assignments out as "Spring 2008 Latin 2020 <insert assignment name here>.doc". And yeah, that's ridiculously long, but it doesn't matter how long it is. It could be only a dozen characters because OS X only shows about 10 letters of it, then truncates the rest down until the extension. So I have about 15 different files called Spring 200....doc and no easy way to see what they are. I can mouse over them and get the little popup with the full title to show up occasionally, but about 75% of the time it never pops up. I could hit enter to rename each one before I open it, but that takes an unnecessary amount of time. I could move them off the desktop, but I use my desktop like a to-do list. It's really really frustrating. Even Windows showed more than 7 characters and I could just click on it to read the whole thing. I could increase the grid size, but I like it how it is now.

For most of my complaints to date with Mac OS (I've had my Macbook about a month) I've been able to dig up a freeware solution or something built-in I was unaware of with Google, but I can't find anything on this after two hours of searching. Blah. Why are some things so easy on Mac and other things so, so hard?

Don't put the files on the desktop then, put them in a folder, change the folder to list view and extend the filename column to view the whole filename.

I agree, that mouse-over thing has to be a bug. And it's always been a problem with osx.

On the desktop, you don't really have a lot of control over what you see, in the way of file extensions. There are 2 little ways to can help this though..
First, you can right click anywhere on your desktop, and select "show view options" and a new window will pop up. In the new window, click "show item info box giving up more options...

Second, you can right click on any item on your desktop, or in any file for that matter, and in the info windows tick "hide file extension" (turned on by default) this will show you the extension of the extension of the item you wanted to see the extension of.

Or there are little apps that can mess your whole system up Here & Here...

Think Mark