XL-FileTools

Comprehensive as the file management tools that come with Windows may be, there’s a number of highly useful utilities that, for reasons beyond me, seem to be ignored by Microsoft version after version.

XL-FileTools aims at filling part of that void by giving you, completely free of charge, a set of utilities to count, list, copy, move, and rename files and folders using a comprehensive set of filters that you can create and customize.

This simple utility provides you with an easy way to list folders, files, and extensions and save them as a text, HTML, or XLSX file for your records. This long-sought-after utility seems to be out of the scope of the multiple Windows updates that we, as Windows users, have to suffer every few days or weeks, apparently only to patch yet another bug instead of adding new functionality. The text file created can include not only the names and paths of the files, but also their hash value, some file details, the number of lines in them (for text-based files only), the number of files in a given folder or subfolder, etc.

The program can also copy and move selected files and folders in a more accurate way than any existing or previous version of Windows has ever envisaged. Thanks to the program’s use of user-devised filters, you can target a specific set of files to copy or move based on a keyword, regex, a last-modified or last-accessed date, or a combination of any of these and other filters you may think of.

Finally, XL-FileTools’ renaming functionality will let you change the filenames of selected items and preserve their extension (or not), sort them before renaming them using incremental values, or use a keyword or regex to replace them.

Knowing that their program cannot roll back any of the changes made and conscious of the importance of being extra cautious when making changes like these in bulk, the program’s developers have devised a preview window for you, where you can foresee what will happen if you decide to tell the program to process your request.

XL-FileTools is an open-source development, which seems to be the only way of providing Windows OS users with such a simple yet so useful set of features. This is one of those tools one comes across with by chance, tries it a couple of times, and end up staying on their desktop forever.