Tip – View Recently Opened Files On Windows

Have you lately made changes to a file, closed it by mistake, and lost it somewhere? Do you want to know what files the person with whom you share a computer recently opened? With Windows, finding recently opened files is quite simple. Therefore, it is simple to re-edit recently closed files or find out who last accessed them.

In this post, we’ll go over how to see recently accessed files on Windows, when they were last edited, and how to get deleted files back.

How to See Recently Opened Files on Windows

Using Quick Access or the Recent Items folder are the two options Windows provides for seeing recently opened files.

The Recent Items folder stores a history of files and folders accessed several days ago, while Quick Access simply displays a small number of recently opened items (about 20). A user may thus go back and see which files were accessed on a certain day, even one that was a week or month ago.

Additionally, you cannot arrange recently opened files in Quick Access by certain criteria, despite this being possible in the Recent Items folder. Let’s examine two approaches to accessing recently opened files in Windows.

View recently opened files in Windows 10/11

You may see recently opened files with the assistance of Windows 10/11’s Quick Access. Here’s how to see recently opened files with Quick Access.

Step 1: Launch File Explorer and choose the Quick Access tab. File Explorer opens to Quick Access by default. If not, you may switch to it by clicking the Quick Access option in File Explorer’s left pane.

Step 2: The 20 most recent opened files are shown in Quick Access’ Recent Files section. At the top/start of the list is the file that was most recently opened.

Advanced method to view all types of recently opened files in Windows 10/11

Step 1: Press the Windows logo + R hotkey to launch the Run command box.

Step 2: To access the Recent Items folders, copy and paste the following path into the Run command box and press Enter. All recently opened files and folders are kept in the Recent Items folder.

%AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\

Step 3: Select the Date modified column to order all of the files in the folder according to when they were last edited. To sort files by the date they were edited, you may also right-click on an empty space, choose Sort by, and then choose Date modified by.

Use Nirsoft’s RecentFilesView tool to view recently opened files in Windows 10/11

The benefit of using RecentFilesView over the default Windows ways is that it displays all file types, including system files. This could be helpful to you while troubleshooting!

Step 1: Download the RecentFilesView tool from this website. Run the RecentFilesView software after extracting the ZIP archive. It doesn’t need to be installed.

Step 2: All recently opened files are shown in the list. A file’s entry may be right-clicked on to reveal options to open and copy it.

How to See Recently Opened Files Removed From Quick Access

You may rapidly access recently closed files using the access point known as Quick Access. Therefore, even if you or a computer user with whom you share a computer deletes the files from Quick Access, they remain in their original place. Using the same procedures we previously described, you may still retrieve the recently closed files in the primary Recent Items folder.

Access Recently Opened Files With Ease

We can quickly see which files you or someone else has lately worked on simply looking at the recently opened files. You should now be able to easily retrieve recently opened files in Quick Access and the Recent Items folder thanks to our instructions.

You can attempt to restore the files using our solution if someone deletes them from the Recent Items folder after using them. If you are successful, you are all set; if not, you must use third-party recovery software.