We have many files and folders in our Windows PC and we may delete or add more files and folders frequently. There could be some folders and files which are very important to us and someone might edit them without our notice. But, we cannot keep on looking at each and every folder and file to know which one was edited. If it was a modification of a file or folder, we can sort them by using ‘Last modified’ and we can get to know which were modified recently.
But, what if some of the files and folders were deleted from that directory? We would not be in a position to keep track of what was exactly deleted. But, you can use Excel to view files and folder details of directory which would be helpful to you to know at least the list of files and folders that were deleted.
Import and get a list of filenames into an Excel sheet
If you use Microsoft Excel to import all details of files and folders into Excel, it will help you keep track of last modified date and time, file types, list of files, files size and many more regularly. To do this, follow these simple steps. Move to the directory or folder on Windows File Explorer which you want to keep track of. Here, I want to keep track of my files and folders of Documents folder. Copy the path of that directory.
Now, open any web browser of your choice and paste the copied path (Path of the folder you just copied in the previous step) in the address bar of the browser. I used Google Chrome here. Just prefix the URL by file:///and the content will be shown as the web page.
To save this web page as the offline copy, press CTRL+S or right-click on the web page and select “Save Page As”. Select the destination, give it a name, and save the webpage.
Now, via Windows Explorer go the location you saved the offline webpage and copy the path. The, open the Excel sheet and tap on the Data tab and click on From Web. It opens up the Window and in the Address bar paste the copied path and click the “Go” button. It will load all the contents of the webpage.
It shows you the yellow boxes with arrows and it will allows you to select the required frame. You can find here that I selected the part I want.
Once done with these steps, now click on Import button and you see that all the files and folders details are imported to your Excel sheet in no time. You can see that the data is shown in the columns and gives us a clear idea of every detail.
Conclusion As we are engaged most of the time, in organizing files and folders, it is advisable to import files and folders details into Excel. This would be helpful if any of your file or folder was to get deleted. The data in the Excel sheet does not refresh, so we need to import the data regularly. You can use this method when to not only keep track of file changes but also filenames.
