Member Avatar for Susan Roden

I work in the IT department. I have been given the task of compiling a list of all the Access databases we have on our server and creating an Excel spreadsheet (using MS office 2007) with certain data such as name of database, access date, owner etc.

My problem is if I do a search using My Computer the list I'm given is perfect except I cannot get that data from that screen into Excel. Using Command prompt is very cumbersome and I can't seem to get a good format to save the data and it be useable.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by gordon451

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— exporting the Search UI view is brittle. Rather than trying to copy the results screen or parse an irregular dir dump, produce a proper CSV that Excel can open directly. is right that Text to Columns helps only when the source is consistently delimited; 's Indexing Service is another route, but a small PowerShell script is the most reliable way to get filename, last-access time and owner into Excel.

Use PowerShell to recurse the server share, read file properties and the ACL owner, and export to CSV. Example (run on a machine that can reach the server share and has the rights to read ACLs):

$path = "\\server\share"
Get-ChildItem -Path $path -Filter *.mdb -Recurse |
  Where-Object {-not $_.PSIsContainer} |
  Select-Object FullName, Name, LastAccessTime, Length,
    @{Name='Owner';Expression={(Get-Acl $_.FullName).Owner}} |
  Export-Csv -Path "C:\temp\AccessFiles.csv" -NoTypeInformation -Encoding UTF8

Opening the resulting CSV in Excel will give clean columns you can sort/filter. See Get-ChildItem, Get-Acl and Export-Csv for details.

Notes: reading the ACL owner requires appropriate permissions; run the script with an account that can read ACLs on the target files. Some servers disable updating LastAccessTime for performance — verify with fsutil if needed (see Microsoft docs). If PowerShell is not available, lightweight tools such as "Everything" (Voidtools) or forfiles can export lists, but they may not include owner info without extra steps.

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Member Avatar for zeroth

have you tried the Data tab / Text to Columns command in Excel to delimit the data from the redirected text file?

Member Avatar for Susan Roden

Yes I have tried that but when I get a list using Command prompt it has so much information in it that when the cells are split in Excel using the Data / Text to Columns the data is not put into useable columns. I'm also new to using MS Office 2007.

Member Avatar for gordon451

Dumb question time. Have you tried the Indexing Service?

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