ExplorerDir

The Windows File Explorer comes with quite the variety of options to navigate, view, and filter items for properly organizing content. However, there’s no built-in method of enlisting items inside a directory so you can create a report, but there are solutions in the form of third-party applications like ExplorerDir.

The first thing you might want to know is that you don’t even have to go through a setup process to make things work. This allows you to store the program on a thumb drive in case you want or need to use it on other computers. Runtime doesn’t make any changes to system registry entries, so you can rest assured that the health status of the target PC remains intact.

Running the application isn’t really the way to go, because it simply enlists directories in the Windows root folder. This isn’t really an inconveniences, because grabbing info on the directory of interest is more comfortable since it also integrates itself in the system context menu. Note, however, that a system restart might be required at first.

As such, you can then select the Directory Listing item from the context menu of any directory. Sadly, there’s no possibility to include subfolders in your report. As soon as this option is selected, the window shows up so you can choose what and how to export. You can either copy all values to clipboard, print on a sheet of paper, or save as a TXT file to a location of choice.

There are a few filters to apply before the list is created. You can choose to have only particular extensions enlisted, set the type of delimiter, sorting method, attributes to include such as normal, hidden, and read only, as well as whether or not to include directories, files, size, and date.

Bottom line is that ExplorerDir might seem like a simple application overall, but it can save you a lot of effort when you need to create directory lists in reports. Various filters can be applied before the list is created, and triggering the core function is comfortably done through the context menu of the target folder.