In this chapter, most commonly available or recently featured physical methods to characterize solids are described. Some techniques will be discussed more thoroughly if it helps the reader to understand general principles in the characterization of solids, others will just be described briefly. The chapter starts with X-ray diffraction in general followed by X-ray powder and single crystal diffraction, including different methods of structure determination. X-ray microscopy/tomography and various electron microscopy techniques are discussed next, i.e., SEM, TEM, Cryo-EM, EDX, STEM, superSTEM, EELS. This is followed by scanning probe microscopy (STM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). Spectroscopic methods are then discussed, such as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (ss-NMR) spectroscopy. The chapter ends with an overview on different thermal analysis techniques including coupling with mass spectrometry and infrared spectroscopy as well as temperature-controlled reduction. A table provides a quick overview of the methods described in this chapter.