How to Easily Copy All filenames in a folder to Excel in Windows

In this short post, I’m going to show you how to easily copy all filenames in a Window folder to Microsoft Excel.

First a caveat, the main limitation of the method I’m going to show you, is that you cannot copy filenames in subfolders. If you want to learn how to how to copy filenames in subfolders, check out the how to easily copy All filenames in a folder to Excel using MS DOS post.

Let’s jump right into it.

Step 1: Open Excel

Open up excel and then navigate to the folder that contains the files.

Step 2: Navigate to Folder and Select All the Files

Navigate to the folder that contains the files.  In the folder that contains the files, select all the files in the folder. You can use the shortcut keys, Ctrl + a.

Step 3: Hold Shift Key and Right Click

Now, holding the Shift key, hover over your selection and right click.

Step 4: Click Copy as Path                

In the window that pops up, click copy as path. This copies the file path of all the files to the Clipboard.

Step 5: Paste Filepaths in Excel

Navigate to Excel, I’m using ALT and Tab key, and paste the file paths.

Step 6: Use Replace Function in Excel

We are going to remove the folder path using replace function in excel and we’ll have the filenames.

So double click on one of the cells, select and copy the folder path. Click on Find and Select, scroll down to replace. Click on replace and paste the folderpath. Then click on replace all.

Close the Find and Select dialog. Save your excel document and you have successfully copied all the file names in a folder into an excel document.

That’s it for this post, if you want to learn how to also copy the filenames in subfolders, check out this post on how to copy all filenames in a folder into Excel using MS DOS.

And here’s a short how-to video: