Recent lists the documents that changed most recently, newest first, so the work in progress is always one click away. It has no row in the Explorer sidebar, where Home answers "what was I working on" and "what happened": open it from See more in Home's Jump back in (the last tile of the strip on a phone), or at /explorer/recent. Its breadcrumb reads Home › Recent and leads back to Home.
What lands here
Recent draws on every document you can open: your own, your teams', and the ones shared with you. It shows the 12 that were saved most recently, by you or by anyone you work with, so a teammate's edit to a team document brings it up the list too.
It is a view across your whole library, not a folder of its own: a document appearing in Recent has not been moved or copied, and you will still find it in its folder (or at the root of My documents).
Recent goes by when a document last changed, not when you last looked at it: simply opening a document does not move it. For the documents you open most and last, look at Jump back in on Home.
Working from Recent
- Open a document by clicking it.
- Switch between List, Card and Details views with the toggle in the header; on a computer, List view adds an owner column, since Recent mixes your documents with other people's.
- Type in the Explorer's search box to filter the list: Recent then shows the 12 newest documents that match.
- Each document's ⋯ menu (or a right-click) carries the same actions as anywhere else in the Explorer: Rename, Duplicate, Change Folder, Favourite, History, Hide from Recent, and Delete, plus Open Team on a team document.
- Offline documents appear here too, and their menu adds Sync Document (or Take Offline on a cloud document).
- A document shared with you has a shorter menu: Open and Dismiss.
Seeing where a document lives
Recent spans every folder, so each document shows a small chip naming the folder it sits in, beside its name. Click the chip to jump straight to that folder instead of opening the document, which is the quickest way to see what else you filed alongside it. (In List and Details views on a phone the chip is hidden to save room.)
Documents at the root show My documents. Team documents name the team, and the chip opens the team's library. Documents shared with you don't show one at all: they sit in the other person's library rather than yours.
Hiding a document from Recent
Some documents you open now and then but never want cluttering the list. Choose Hide from Recent in a document's menu and it stops appearing here, no matter how recently it changed; the next newest document takes its place. The same menu then reads Show in Recent, so it is easy to put back. The menu item is also in the editor's Explorer panel.
The document itself is untouched: it stays in its folder, in search, on its share links, and opens normally. Only this list changes, which is why there is no badge on it anywhere else: the menu item tells you the state where you would change it.
The choice is yours alone. Hiding a team document from your Recent doesn't hide it from your teammates'. (Documents shared with you can't be hidden; use Dismiss instead.) It travels with your account, so it applies on your other devices too, and works the same whether or not you're signed in. Up to 60 documents can be hidden at once; past that, the one you hid longest ago comes back.
Recent is owner-scoped like the rest of the Explorer: a guest sees the documents their own browser can open, and signing in carries them into your account.
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