Hello my learned friends at the microsoft forum. This is not strictly an excel related question, but I thought I could start here. I have attached a pdf screen snapshot of a microsoft folder on my desktop. The real file is much larger, this is just a sample to illustrate what I want to do. The folder contains file information on several music files and the attributes are name (or filename) then song title, then contributing artist, and album. I want to export this microsoft file list and all the associated attributes to a CSV file so I can further edit it in excel.



I realize I can use cmd or powershell to direct the filename to excel, but thats only part of what I need to do, I need to have this folder open in excel with a column for filename, title, contributing artist, and album. In other words I need to turn this windows folder into an excel spreadsheet with seperate columns for all the existing attributes listed. Any suggestions on how this can be done? Many thanks

Attached Files

folderforexcelforumpdf.pdf (46.6 KB, 7 views)

Hi, you can probably use Power Query ( available as an add in in 2013) to import the data.

Perhaps post your data file ( no pics please) so we can work with it. Thx

__________________
Using O365 v2503 - Did you know you can thank someone who helped you? Click on the tiny scale in the right upper hand corner of your helper's post

HI there,it loks like power query requires .net framework and microsoft edge to work? I was hoping there was an easier way to do this. How do I post my data file here? thanks

Don't think you need either to run PQ.

Power Query is a free AddIn for Excel 2010 and 2013, and is built-in functionality from Excel 2016 onwards (where it is referred to as "Get & Transform Data").

It is a powerful yet simple way of getting, changing and using data from a broad variety of sources, creating steps which may be easily repeated and refreshed. I strongly recommend learning how to use Power Query - it's among the most powerful functionalities of Excel.

- Follow this link to learn how to install Power Query in Excel 2010 / 2013.

- Follow this link for an introduction to Power Query functionality.

__________________
Alan עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַ Using O365 v2505

OK, I wil try it, but I cant find the links you said to follow?

For Alansidman, I downloaded power query and tried it, turns out it was really easy to do, it created an excel workbook from my folder that I won't even have to do much editing on. Thanks for the rgreat advice. I will mark this thread as closed now because my problem has been solved.

Glad to have helped. Thanks for the feedback.

__________________
Alan עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַ Using O365 v2505

A small acknowledgment of my help would be nice, though.

__________________
Using O365 v2503 - Did you know you can thank someone who helped you? Click on the tiny scale in the right upper hand corner of your helper's post

I do appreciate all the help, power query does work for some of the stuff I want to do, but it doesn't present all the metadata fields that are in the current windows folder I want to export. It seems to choose its own fields. I was hoping to resolve this without resorting to using VBS code or any coding language, and I will keep researching this. Thanks again