Have you ever gotten really frustrated at Windows Explorer or My Computer? While the two applications do a good job of showing you files and directory structures, they are very limited when it comes to more advanced capabilities. What if you want to perform some action on all files that match a particular filename, such as renaming them all as "old"? What if you want to sort you pictures by image size as opposed to file size? You can't! At least, not without doing all sorts of tricks and manipulations to get the operating system to understand what you want. Fortunately there are some third-party add-in tools that can help, and Advanced File Worker is one of them.

This little gem of a utility allows you to perform tons of advanced capabilities on your files. You can select files in a directory based on masks, and you can script actions to be performed on files with a single button click, saving tons of times and headaches! You can even schedule tasks to be run at particular times! Advanced File Worker has a lot of functionality built into a single utility, and it works fast and easily. This isn't one of those "promise to do everything but fail at most tasks" tools; this one has a special set of things it does, and it does them really well.

Ask any UNIX or Linux user what they miss most about that operating system when they get confronted with Windows, and they are likely to tell you the command line, and its ability to allow scripting and wild cards. Windows just can't do any of that stuff with the Windows Explorer tool. Fortunately, there is a solution I found. It's called Advanced File Worker and it acts as an extension to the Windows Explorer application (it can even be used from the DOS command line!). Writing scripts to manipulate files and filenames is not problem. You can write complex scripts and launch them with a single mouse click. You can even schedule scripts to run at specific times! The scripting process is easy to learn and you don't need to know shell languages like awk and sed! For a UNIX or Linux user, this is nirvana!

Advanced File Worker does a lot more than scripting. It has a ton of extensions to Windows Explorer that even those who don't want scripting will appreciate. One extension that jumped out at me right away was the ability to sort image files by the actual image size (width and height) instead of file size! Really cool! Another feature I really liked was the ability to apply masks to files and directories, hiding those I didn't want to see and displaying only those that I wanted. Even cooler! Advanced File Worker can even automate backups of files and directories for you!