ExpPrint is a directory listing and folder contents program that integrates with Windows File Explorer. It allows you to view, print, and save listings of files, directories, and virtual folders from any file store accessible with Explorer, including local disks and networked shares, SharePoint libraries, and cloud storage systems. ExpPrint listings can include any combination of file system properties and metadata tags/properties of any file types that Windows supports, as well as computed hash values.
Features
ExpPrint can output many (very many) properties:
File System Properties
Name, Size, Type, Timestamps, Attributes, Owner.
Embedded metadata tags/properties for office documents and media files such as .doc(x), .xls(x), .jpg, .mp3, .wmv, .wma, and all other formats supported by the operating system. Here's a small selection of the properties gathered (there are many more):
Version, Title, Author, Date Saved, Keywords, Tags, People Names, Track Number, Bit Rate, Album Artist, ISO setting, Focal Length, Dimensions, Date Taken, etc.
Flexible typographic styling capabilities. Color, font face and size are configurable for each section of a listing by way of standard style sheets (CSS). A wide selection of styles are provided, showing many of the possibilities.
Flexible indentation formatting for hierarchic subdirectory listings.
XML/HTML output provides viewing, print and print preview capabilities (through your Internet browser), and can often be imported directly into other applications.
Should you need additional flexibility, the open XML based architecture allows for more comprehensive customization and custom applications.
Can list the contents of compressed (zip, cab) files, and follow symbolic linked directories.
It's XML/HTML output is fully Unicode, so it supports any combination of languages that Windows itself supports.
We hope you'll find it's the best and most comprehensive file and directory contents listing tool available for its price.
The current versions of all the major browsers work well for quality HTML output from ExpPrint for reasonable sized listings, though Internet Explorer and Chrome perform considerably better than Firefox on longer listings. In particular, Firefox is incredibly slow doing a print preview for long listings.
For a listing of around 30 pages, IE, Edge, and Chrome took around 3 seconds to create a print preview, while Firefox took around 7 seconds. For much larger listings, Firefox becomes incredibly slow. Where IE took 38 seconds for a 250 page listing, Chrome produced its first page in 7 seconds, with the final page in 33 seconds, but I gave up waiting for Firefox after 5 minutes.
If you encounter any issues with ExpPrint and your favourite browser, please send us an email and let us know.
Internet Explorer...
V9...V11
No issues noticed so far that impede use with ExpPrint.
V8
Printing and print preview facilities are very good.
It appears to have a bug that may show up in some conditions with ExpPrint. It involves a particular HTML construction that can arise with ExpPrint in the folder total row if the folder name has a high-order Unicode character. If this situation occurs, the whole listing doesn't appear! Given the obscurity of the character range involved I don't think this will occur very often though, I only hit on it by chance in testing. Note: Microsoft fixed this for V9.
The print preview can take quite a while to generate if the document is more than a few pages long.
V6, V7
If you want to print with background colours you may need to alter the setting in: Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, then in the Settings list it's: Printing, "Print background colors and images". In later versions this setting is more easily accessible on the Page Setup dialog.
Doesn't support the formatting facilities that are used by ExpPrint's "Special Folder Indicators" style sheets. Consequently there are no indicators for zip, symbolic links, or shared folders, or the [] & {} bracketing of symbolic links and zip folder size values, however they are still differentiated by the same colour differences when you use the colour style sheets.
There's a minor bug in Internet Explorer 7 (which is fixed in IE8) when displaying mixed language texts. If a line contains a mix of left-to-right and right-to-left language texts, at anything other than 100% zoom, the texts will overlap.
Mozilla Firefox...
V51.0.1
Generally OK, but still painfully slow in generating its print preview for very large listings.
V18.0 to V25.0
It's incredibly slow to generate a print preview for large documents, but it now eventually displays a message that a script has been running for a long time. It no longer crashed or consumed excessively large amounts of memory on large listings - a listing with 123 pages previewed OK (though very slowly).
V9.0.1, V6.0, V5.01, V4
Generally fine though print preview generation is noticeably slower than IE for large documents and gives rise to appearing as though the application is hung.
Crashes generating a print preview for a large listing (around 100 pages). A 70 page document was OK.
Google Chrome...
V56.0.2924.87
Table heading repeating is OK now and rows no longer appear to be split over a page.
Initial loading of extremely large listings is still slower than IE, but its print preview now seems to be much faster than IE.
V30.0.1599.101m
Although large listings initially appear quicker than with Internet Explorer 11, Chrome hasn't actually completed loading the whole listing and remains sluggish for about 3 times longer than it takes Internet Explorer 11.
It doesn't handle print previewing of extremely large listings well - it can become unresponsive.
It doesn't repeat the table headings on each page.
A row may be split over a page.
Issues noted against earlier versions seem to be resolved.
V27.0.1453.110m
When the name column is very wide, it seems to omit any other columns.
V16.0.912.75m
Print preview now has headers and footers, but occasionally seems to overlay one table row onto the next row.
Opera...
V12.15
Some aspects of the CSS styling are missing.
Doesn't repeat headers across pages
V11.50
Much faster to generate a print preview than the other browsers, but I noticed that using Page Down in print preview stopped scrolling around half way through a document - though the scroll bar operations were fine.
Doesn't display the graphics for the shared/images column.
Microsoft Edge...
Win10 Initial Release
Doesn't always honor the "Don't wrap dates" style for the print output. Doesn't currently have "print background colours and images" facilities.
We've had a few requests for ExpPrint to print out the contents of the Temporary Internet Files folders. Unfortunately it's not possible to do this in a general way that fits in with the current version of ExpPrint. Furthermore, it appears that Microsoft haven't implemented the shell enumeration methods on all their shell namespaces (such as the Temporary Internet Files folder) - so it's not possible to implement it in a consistent way in the planned future version of ExpPrint either.
Consequently, we have decided to produce a dedicated console application that lets you output the list in a tab delimited format. The output of the program can be redirected to a file, which can then be imported into a spreadsheet application (such as Microsoft Excel) where you process it and print it.
TmpIfs is freely available to all registered users of ExpPrint. Download the TmpIfs.zip file, expand the TmpIfs.exe program into a sub–folder and run it from a command prompt.
"ExpPrint provides a utility that Windows Explorer should have on its own. The ability to create listings with detailed information is an extremely helpful one and something that will save a ton of time for people that would otherwise have to do it manually."
The 3d2f.com editors have rated ExpPrint as: "The most promising in its class", and say: "ExpPrint is a compact and easy to use file and folder listing tool that seamlessly integrates in the Windows Explorer menu and offers flexible listing customization options. The software allows you to view, print and save file/folder listings with multiple properties, including standard file system properties, metadata and computed hash values ". Read the full review...
Computer Buyer - Utility of the Month Nov 2002 "Printing out listings of files and folders can be extremely useful - if you're making backups say - but it's a function that Microsoft has inexplicably left out of every version of Windows. This month's featured utility, ExpPrint, solves that problem."
WUGNET shareware pick of the week 7 Dec 1997 "Print selected files or entire folder trees directly from Explorer with this comprehensive, easy to use, context menu extension."
DOS World - Practical Windows Dec 1996 "ExpPrint does nothing more than give you a clean printout of a folder's files, their sizes, and their dates. But it performs an essential task that will resolve an Explorer limitation that has annoyed and frustrated a generation of Windows users."
32-bit (x86) package
