Windows Explorer or File Explorers a program that is very integral to Windows operations. Here, you see different files, folders displayed in a hierarchy. The program lets you easily copy, move, rename, and search for files and folders. For example, you can open a folder that contains a file you want to copy or move, and then drag the file to another folder or drive. File Explorer is a File manager. It finds immense use in daily operations, ranging from opening files to transferring them to a different location such as USB drive.

The explorer is divided into following areas:

1. Navigation Pane – Seen on the left-hand side, navigation pane lists all the folders, library items and network connections
2. Details Pane – provides details such as creation& modification date, size, etc about files selected in the explorer.
3. Preview Pane – The Preview pane gives a sneak preview of media and document files.

Sometimes, your Windows Explorer may not display the left side Navigation Pane properly or may appear all grayed out – a possible reason could be file or registry corruption. What do you do under such circumstances. Well, you may try this:

Explorer navigation pane missing

1] Run sfc /scannow to run the system file checker.

2] You may need to re-register the shdocvw.dll file which is used by Windows to add some basic file operations. The shdocvw.dll file is a system file that helps perform the navigation, history maintenance, favorites maintenance, HTML parsing, etc. So see if re-registering this dll file helps you resolve the issue.

Open and elevated command prompt, type the following and hit Enter:

regsvr32 /i shdocvw

3] If you are using Windows 8, you may want to fist check if you have by mistake unchecked the option to show the Navigation Pane.

Open File Explorer > View tab > Navigation pane > Ensure that the option to show Navigation pane is checked.

Hope something helps!