Windows Explorer and macOS Finder can show you what is inside a folder, but neither can turn that view into a spreadsheet. If you need a file list from a folder — with names, sizes, types and dates — for an audit, a handover, or simply to clean up your drive, you are usually stuck copying file names by hand.
This guide shows a faster way: generate a complete file list from any folder and export it straight to Excel, including the largest files, duplicate names, and a ready-made cleanup report.
A spreadsheet lets you sort, filter and search in ways a file explorer window never will. Once your folder is in Excel, you can rank files by size, group them by type, filter by date, or highlight anything that looks like a duplicate — all with a few clicks instead of manual scrolling.
Every file with name, path, type and size on one sheet.
Instantly ranked so you know what to review first.
Repeated file names flagged across sub-folders.
Old and oversized files tagged for review.
Scan any folder and export a complete Excel report in seconds. No upload, no account.
Scan My Folder →Instead of opening every sub-folder and eyeballing sizes, the report includes a dedicated "largest files" sheet, sorted from biggest to smallest with the full path attached. This is the fastest way to see exactly what is eating up your disk space, whether it is old video exports, forgotten installers, or a bloated project folder.
Duplicate file names often pile up when photos get copied across devices or documents get re-saved into new folders. The report cross-checks file names across every sub-folder in your scan and flags repeats, so you can decide what to keep without manually comparing folder after folder.
Beyond a raw list, the workbook also tags files by age and size so you get a practical cleanup list — the files most worth reviewing first, rather than a wall of data with no direction. It is the difference between "here are 4,000 files" and "here are the 30 files you should probably deal with."
No. The scan runs entirely inside your browser. File contents are never read or transmitted — only file names, paths and metadata are used to build the report, and everything stays on your device.
Copying a list of filenames out of a folder feels like it should be a two-click job. In practice, every operating system makes it awkward. Windows Explorer will let you select files and copy them, but pasting into Excel gives you the files themselves, not their names. macOS Finder has a list view that looks like a spreadsheet but refuses to export it. The traditional answers involve a command prompt, a PowerShell one-liner, or a third-party utility that wants installation rights you may not have on a work machine.
A browser-based folder report generator sidesteps all of that. Modern browsers expose a directory picker that hands the page a read-only view of the folder tree you choose. The page walks that tree, reads the metadata each entry carries, and assembles a table you can download as a spreadsheet. Nothing is uploaded, because the browser is already sitting on top of the file system.
This is the part most people get wrong when they expect a folder listing to solve every problem. The browser gives you a specific, limited set of properties for each file, and that set does not include everything your file manager displays.
| Property | Available? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| File name | Yes | Including the extension |
| Relative path | Yes | Rebuilt from the folder walk, e.g. Invoices/2025/Q1/file.pdf |
| Size in bytes | Yes | Exact byte count, which you can format as KB or MB |
| Last modified date | Yes | Taken from the file system timestamp |
| MIME type | Partly | Guessed from the extension; empty for unknown types |
| Created date | No | Not exposed by the web file API on any platform |
| Author, tags, EXIF, document properties | No | Would require parsing each file's internal structure |
| Owner, permissions, ACLs | No | Operating-system level, deliberately hidden from web pages |
If your job depends on creation dates or document authors, a browser tool will not get you there and you should reach for PowerShell instead. If you need names, paths, sizes and modified dates, which covers the overwhelming majority of audit and inventory tasks, the browser is more than enough.
Suppose you have a folder called Client Deliverables with 4,300 files spread over 180 subfolders, and you need to answer three questions: how much space is it using, which files have not been touched in over two years, and are there duplicate filenames across subfolders.
=COUNTIF(B:B,B2) against the filename column. Any value above 1 flags a repeated name. Filter to those rows and you have your duplicate report.That entire sequence takes a couple of minutes and produces something you can hand to a manager. Doing it by clicking through Explorer would take an afternoon and you would still not trust the numbers.
Raw byte counts are accurate but unreadable. In your spreadsheet, add a column that converts them. For megabytes use =A2/1048576 and format to one decimal place. For a column that switches units automatically, a nested formula works: =IF(A2<1024,A2&" B",IF(A2<1048576,ROUND(A2/1024,1)&" KB",ROUND(A2/1048576,1)&" MB")). Keep the raw byte column, though. Sorting on a text column that mixes "900 KB" and "1.2 MB" will put them in the wrong order, because the sort is alphabetical.
Pointing the picker at your entire user profile or a synced cloud drive root can mean walking hundreds of thousands of entries. The tool will still work, but the browser tab will be busy for a while and the resulting spreadsheet may be unwieldy. Start with a subfolder and widen from there.
OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive desktop clients often store files as small placeholders until you open them. A folder walk may report those placeholder sizes rather than the true file sizes. If your totals look implausibly small, this is usually why. Make the folder available offline first, or run the report against a location that is fully local.
Entries beginning with a dot, plus operating-system artefacts like Thumbs.db and .DS_Store, will appear in the listing. They are real files, so including them is technically correct, but they clutter a report. Filter them out in the spreadsheet with a simple text criterion rather than trying to eyeball them.
These are reported as small files, because that is what they are on disk. They do not expand into whatever they point at. A folder full of shortcuts will look nearly empty in a size report, which is correct but occasionally surprising.
Honesty about limits saves you time. A browser folder report will not: read inside archives such as ZIP or RAR to list their contents; compute checksums or hashes to find true byte-identical duplicates; access network shares by UNC path that are not mounted as a drive letter; monitor a folder continuously for changes; or run on a schedule. For any of those, a scripted solution is the right tool. What the browser does well is the one-off, right-now inventory where installing software is either impossible or not worth the friction.
The directory picker grants the page read access to the folder you explicitly choose, and nothing else. The walk, the metadata extraction and the spreadsheet assembly all happen in the tab. You can verify this yourself: open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network panel, and run a report. You will see the page load and then silence. Or simply disconnect from the internet after the page has loaded, and generate the report anyway. It works, because there is no server involved in the work.
That property matters for exactly the folders people most want to inventory: legal files, HR records, client deliverables, medical archives, financial statements. Those are the folders where the filenames alone are sensitive, and where an upload-based tool would be a non-starter.
Yes. The tool walks the full tree beneath the folder you select and records a relative path for each file, so you can see exactly where every entry sits.
No. The web file API exposes only the last-modified timestamp. Creation dates are not available to browser pages on any operating system, so a scripted approach is needed if you specifically require them.
Tens of thousands of entries is routine on a normal machine. Very large trees, in the hundreds of thousands, will take longer and produce a spreadsheet that is slow to open, so it is usually better to run the report on subfolders.
No. The folder is read locally by the browser and the spreadsheet is assembled in the page. You can confirm this by watching the Network panel in developer tools, or by disconnecting from the internet before generating the report.
Two common reasons: cloud-sync placeholders that have not been downloaded report their stub size, and file managers often show disk space used, which rounds each file up to a whole number of allocation units.
You can find duplicate filenames easily using a COUNTIF formula on the name column. Finding byte-identical duplicates with different names requires hashing each file, which this approach does not do.
Folder selection is a desktop browser capability. On mobile the picker is generally limited to individual files, so a full folder walk is not available.
A spreadsheet file you can open directly in Excel, LibreOffice Calc, Google Sheets or Numbers, with one row per file and separate columns for path, name, size and modified date.