Everyone probably knows a friend, fellow student or colleague whose desktop has at some point become a completely inscrutable collection of the most diverse folders, files and shortcuts.
Hats off to anyone who can keep an overview in such a chaos. If you don’t want to be the master of chaos, or if you prefer your computer to be tidy, you can create many folders. A well-considered folder structure on the computer is the basis for always keeping track.
If you then have to keep track of many Word or Excel files during your studies or at work, you would rather create more folders than too few. But with the usual way of right-clicking on each folder for Windows operating systems, this is relatively cumbersome. Even if you know the key combination for a new folder, CTRL+SHIFT+N, you can only create one new folder at a time.
In this tutorial, we will show you how you can create multiple folders at the same time and how you can rename them in no time.
It’s that easy to create a new folder with PowerShell
To create one or more new folders, go to the folder in which you want to create the new folders. Then you open the Windows PowerShell for this folder.
To open Powershell in a folder, press SHIFT and right-click in the folder. The normal context menu has been expanded to include the entry “Open PowerShell window here”. You now select this entry.
The blue PowerShell window opens, which looks very similar to the command prompt. After waiting a short moment, the path of the folder for which you opened the PowerShell will appear in the first line of the PowerShell.
With the command “md” (make directory English for create folder) you can create a new folder. It is important that you cannot assign spaces to folders that you create using PowerShell!
To create a new folder, simply type the command in PowerShell:
“With exampleBinder1″
a.
After you have confirmed the command with ENTER, the work result of PowerShell appears and the path again and you can enter another command.
How can you create multiple folders at the same time with PowerShell?
To create multiple folders in PowerShell, you can extend the command as you like. All you have to do is type a semicolon ( ; ) after each folder, and then again “md” followed by the next folder name.
A corresponding command would look like this, for example:
“md folder1; md folder2; md folder3; md folder4”
To shorten the work, you can also insert words in PowerShell with CTRL+V. For example, you don’t always have to spell out the word “folder”.
If you want to create a lot of folders, you can quickly open an Excel spreadsheet and display the folder names. In this way, any number of folder names can be created in just a few seconds.
As an example, we create the folders “excelFolder1” to “excelFolder20” in such a way that they can be easily created with Powershell.
Only three names have to be entered for this. In cell A1 you write “md excelFolder1”, in cell A2 “; md excelFolder2” and in cell A3 “;md excelFolder3”. Then you mark cells A2 and A3 and click on the small square at the bottom right of the border of the selection field, keep the mouse button pressed and enlarge the frame until it covers a total of 19 cells. Now you have 20 folder names.
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In order to be able to enter them in PowerShell, they must be in one line. In Excel365 and from Excel2019 there is the “Text chain” function for this purpose. You use this to combine the contents of several cells into one cell. The function for this is:
=TEXTCHAIN(A1:A20)
Now all folder names are in the Excel cell exactly as you need them in PowerShell.
You simply mark the cell with the function, press CTRL+C, open PowerShell and paste the content here with CTRL+V. So you can create as many folders as you need in just a few seconds.
For example, with this system, you can create a folder for the months of January – December, for different years, and so on.
How to rename multiple files or folders at once
If you want to rename multiple folders or files at the same time, you can do that too windows 10 Likewise. As long as the files are to have the same name with a consecutive number, as is useful for project work, for example.
If the names should be different, there is freeware that saves you the hassle of hard work.
To rename multiple files and folders, all you have to do is highlight the relevant items in a folder and press the F2 key. Now you can change the name of a file. For example, the 20 folders should no longer be called “excel folder” 1 to 20, but “Project folder” 1 to 2. So you simply name a folder “Project folder (1)” and confirm with ENTER.
With these tricks, you can organize even the messiest computer in no time.
