Display a list of recently opened or saved files in Windows

It is easy to lose sight of a file that you have saved to your computer system. While most programs use default locations to save files, it can happen that files get saved to another location.

The Firefox web browser for example sets download directories based on the server files get downloaded from. This means that you may end up saving files into different directories on the system.

You may save files to different directories on purpose. If you are using a word processing program, you may save financial documents into a different folder than other documents for example.

Nirsoft's new OpenSaveFilesview program is a tiny portable application for the Windows operating system that you can use for a variety of tasks including as a reminder that helps you locate saved or opened files again.

The program displays the most recent items in its interface on start and you may notice that it takes a couple of seconds before results are displayed.

Here you find each file listed with its name and extension, and where applicable its open and file modification time.

You may notice that files listed here are limited to open and save dialogs. What this means is that you won't find programs or files listed here that you ran manually on the system for example, only those that were saved or loaded using save or load dialogs.

Nirsoft's program pulls the information from the following two Windows Registry locations:

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ComDlg32\OpenSaveMRU
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ComDlg32\OpenSavePidlMRU

The program ships with the usual traits. You can sort the data with a click on a table header, for instance by data or file extension. There is also an option to save the selected data as a txt, xml, csv or HTML file or display file properties in the interface.

The program lacks options to manage files directly though. You cannot open the files directly nor delete them. If you have located a file listed by the program, for instance by using the built-in search, you will have to open Windows Explorer or another file manager to open it as you cannot do so directly from within OpenSaveFilesView.

That's a severe limitation and implementing this feature could improve the application significantly. For now, it can be used to locate files you saved or opened previously only.