Folders are how you organise a growing library in the Explorer. Every document lives in exactly one folder, or in none (at the root of its space), and folders can nest inside other folders, so you can shape your work into whatever tree fits how you think. A team has folders of its own too (Team spaces), which work the same way.
Creating a folder
Open My documents or a folder in the Explorer and use the Create button at the top right:
- New Folder adds a folder at the top level of My documents.
- Inside a folder, the same entry reads New Subfolder, so you can nest as deep as you need. A folder's own menu offers New Subfolder too, including from the sidebar.
A new folder starts named "New folder" with its name ready to type over: type a name and press Enter. Your folder tree shows under My documents in the sidebar, so every folder is one click away.
Putting documents in folders
- Move an existing document. Open a document's menu (its ⋯ button or a right-click) and choose Change Folder. The picker is the same browser as the New Document wizard's Location step: pick My documents or a team first, then click into the folder you want. When the document already sits in a folder, the picker opens right there, that folder selected, with the back button leading up. A New Folder entry at the bottom creates one on the spot, and it follows your selection: with a folder selected it reads New Subfolder and creates inside that folder, with the space itself selected it creates at the top level. Press Move here, or double-click the destination to move in one go.
- Drag it. On the Explorer page, drag a document's row or card onto a folder in the sidebar or the list, onto My documents to put it back at the root, or onto a team to move it there. In the editor's Explorer panel, drag one of your documents onto a folder the same way.
- Reach a subfolder while dragging. Rest the dragged document on a folder with an arrow in front of it for a moment and the folder opens, so you can drop into a subfolder. Rest on an open folder and it closes again.
- Create straight into a folder. Open the folder first, then Create, New document, and the new document lands inside it.
Renaming and deleting
Each folder has a menu (its ⋯ button, a right-click, or Shift+F10 in the sidebar) with Rename, New Subfolder, Change Folder (to move the folder and everything in it), Use as default for (see Default folders) and Delete.
Deleting a folder asks you to confirm first, and it doesn't delete your documents: the documents and subfolders directly inside it move up into the folder it sat in, or to the root of My documents for a top-level folder. A subfolder keeps everything inside it, so a whole branch moves up one level intact.
Telling folders apart
In the card view a folder shows a small mosaic of what's inside it (the document snapshots it holds, then its subfolders), so you can tell two similarly named folders apart by sight rather than by reading. An empty folder keeps the plain folder glyph. A folder that is one of your default folders also carries a small mark after its name.
A document that isn't filed in any folder sits at the root of My documents, beside your folders. Moving it into a folder is what takes it off the root.
Keep the tree shallow at first. A handful of top-level folders by project or client is easier to scan than deep nesting, and you can always add subfolders as a folder fills up.
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