Copying a File Directory

Here’s a little timesaver that can save you a lot of unnecessary work.  Over time, the number of files in a segment of your directory can reach a volume that can make it challenging to remember what they each represent.  There are also times which you may wish to email or otherwise note what you have on your hard drive.

You could, of course, manually copy them into an Excel worksheet, but who wants to do that!  There are, happily, easy ways to copy a List of Files into a worksheet.  Here is the first one:

1.    Open the folder on your drive and select all the documents with CTRL-A

2.    To select the files, use the shift button and mouse: Shift+Right-Click and then

3.    Choose Copy as Path from the dropdown menu

4.    Return to your spreadsheet and Right-Click/Paste

5.    Using this approach, you will paste the full path, Including the filename, of each document

6.    Finish up with any Formatting you choose

A more sophisticated way, perhaps, is to use Power Query.  Power Query is a free add-in that you can download from the Microsoft website and automatically install in your 2010 or 2013 version of Excel.

With Power Query, you can:

·        Import data from multiple logs

·        Connect to data across a wide variety of sources

·        Create custom views of your data

·        Perform data cleansing operations

·        Do Online Search for data from a large collection of public data sources

·        Much more…

We will take a closer look at Power Query in a future blog post, but in the meantime, remember, there are Easy Ways to copy a file directory.  And, of course, “Easy” is always a good thing!