Microsoft Office File List

A Microsoft Office File List is an XML file named filelist.xml that Microsoft Office programs saves along with the files that make up a document when it is saved as a format that requires multiple files, such as HTML with accompanying images.

As far as Microsoft formats go, this file has surprisingly little bloat, getting to its point pretty quickly. Its function is to provide a listing of all the files that were saved as part of the compound document. The files (other than the main file, which is saved where the user chose to save it in the Office file picker) are saved in a subdirectory called filename_files (which is generally automatically moved or deleted when the same is done to its parent file in Windows Explorer), and filelist.xml is saved along with them in that directory.

The first line is:



The next line has the name of the parent file:



Note the "../" preceding the filename, indicating that the main file is up one directory level; forward slashes are used instead of the normal Windows backward slashes in keeping with the normal use of Unix-style paths in HTML/XML/URLs.

Then there are lines for each of the subsidiary files:



The file ends with a closing XML tag: