How To Save A List Of Every Installed Program

Programs that are Installed on your computer, are either done so by the manufacturer, or (obviously) by yourself and any user who's utilizing your PC. Depending on your computing habits, they can accumulate to a substantial amount and unless you physically document each one, you'll start to lose track of what's Installed. In this tutorial, I will show you how to save a list of every Installed program to a text file.


The easiest way to Identify exactly what programs are Installed on your system, Is to navigate to Control Panel > Uninstall a program. You will then see a list as per my example below.

That's just a snippet of my programs, there's a lot more than that. I certainly cannot remember each one, and I'm sure you're the same. As such, I will demonstrate how to save everything to a text file, Inclusive of their respective version numbers. So If you plan perform a clean Installation of Windows, you'll know exactly what programs to Install thereafter.

To do this, I will be using the good old Command Prompt and PowerShell. So without further ado, let's get this tutorial started.


Step One:
First, I will use PowerShell. To access It, open the Search bar, enter powershell and click on the search result at the top.

Step Two:
To view the list of Installed programs, enter the following command.

Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\* | Select-Object DisplayName, DisplayVersion, Publisher, InstallDate |Format-Table -AutoSize

Then hit the Enter key on your keyboard. The results will then be returned In PowerShell.

Step Three:
We'll now save everything to a text file, by entering the command as per below. I've named my file Windows10TipsInstalledPrograms.txt. You can name yours whatever you want.

Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\* | Select-Object DisplayName, DisplayVersion, Publisher, InstallDate |Format-Table –AutoSize > C:\Users\VM-Predator\Documents\Windows10TipsInstalledPrograms.txt

Your command should look similar to mine. Hit Enter on your keyboard.

Step Four:
As you can see, my text file has been successfully saved to my Documents folder.

Step Five:
Upon opening my text file, It contains the names and (some) version & build numbers of my Installed programs.

Step Six:
Now we'll use the Command Prompt. This must be executed with elevated privileges, otherwise errors will be returned. To do this, open the Search bar and enter cmd. Then right-click the entry at the top, and select Run as administrator.

Step Seven:
To see the list of Installed programs, type In the following command, and then hit the Enter key on your keyboard.

Wmic product get name,version

The list will be returned, as per my example below.

Step Eight:
Let's save this to a text file. Firstly, type wmic and hit the Enter key. Then, Input the command below. This will save the result to your C Drive.

Wmic product get name,version

Here's what your command should look like. Now hit Enter.

Step Nine:
The file has been successfully saved to my C Drive. I'll open It In the next step.

Last Step:
Upon executing the file, as you can see, the program names and their respective version numbers have been saved. I now know exactly what programs are Installed on my PC.

Final Thoughts:
As already mentioned, this comes to very good use when you're planning to perform a clean Installation of Windows 10. There's no way that you'll remember every program and version number, hence having a list, will allow you to reinstall each one with ease.

Once you've generated the text file to a directory of your choice, be sure to save It In a secure location, such as a USB flash drive.