Recent Files

Working on a computer means most activities can be tracked, and Windows lets you easily view the history of opened files. However, you might want a more detailed report, and there are various third-party applications which can take care of this. One suitable example in this regard is Recent Files, doing a quick scan and showing files opened in recent time.

For starters, the application comes in a pretty light package, and doesn’t even take you through the steps of an installer to enable functionality. As such, it can even run from a USB flash drive which you can carry around to use on other computers, without affecting stability because registry entries are not modified.

As far as the visual design is concerned, the application stores its features in a pretty intuitive design, despite its overall simplicity. Most of the space is where detected files are shown, with the possibility to open or delete them, and there’s even a context menu with several file operations at your disposal.

The application doesn’t show detected files on the spot, and you first need to hit the check button for your computer to be scanned. It doesn’t usually take more than a couple of seconds for the list to fill up with all items recently opened. These are enlisted along with item name, date created, and actual filename.

You have the possibility to access the context menu for more file operations. These can be selected and removed, including all of them at once. Moreover, the source folder can be brought up at the press of a button, or the file opened. Sadly, the list can’t be saved to file.

All things considered, we can state that Recent Files is a quick method of finding out which files were recently opened. The list of related details is rather poor, but you can easily identify items. You can quickly jump to source folders, open files, or remove them if necessary.