A friend of mine just pointed me to a really cool little freeware tool that solved an annoying problem I’ve run into many times over the years. If you have ever needed to capture or print out a list of files in a folder, or an entire directory tree from a Windows computer, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Of all the things that are possible from the Windows interface, this has never been straightforward. In the past, I’ve often resorted to taking a screenshot of the Explorer window, but this often is impractical as it is only possible if you have a fairly short structure to print out.

The tool is called YourDir. Like many freeware tools, the interface is a bit non-standard, but it outputs printouts, images, or .csv files, and you can choose to include files, or instead just output the directory tree. Overall it’s a breeze to use and neatly solves an annoying problem, so despite the slightly odd interface it provides a pretty ideal example of a useful utility. It’s really small (68 kB extracted) and as a standalone executable, requires no install.

Current version is 1.7; you can find it via Download.com here.