In our busy work lives documents and files come at us from all directions. With the prevalence of online collaboration our important files now find their home in many locations including SharePoint Document Libraries, file servers, email attachments, Teams chats and channels, and our co-workers’ cloud folders. The number of files we work with and the various locations in which they are stored can make it difficult to locate those files when you need them. The traditional display of folders, sub-folders and files is no longer adequate and makes it time-consuming to find our important files. OneDrive is solving this problem with several improvements we announced in May. Let’s take a deeper look at one those upgrades which recently launched--the new OneDrive Home.
Your new OneDrive Home – available today
The new Home experience for work and school lets you swiftly retrieve your important files, no matter where they reside within your organization.
The new OneDrive for Web Home experience is available for work and school accounts.
The Recent view in OneDrive Home displays all the files you’ve recently opened or used, regardless of whether the file is stored in your OneDrive, shared with you by a colleague, or stored in SharePoint. Now, you won’t need to go searching through multiple locations to get back to the files you were just working on.
For each file in your Recent view, you’ll see the file name, the file location, when you last opened it, the owner, and the most recent file activity. And best of all, you’ll see a similar Recent view in your file experiences across Microsoft 365, such as the Home view in the Teams Files app, in File Explorer, in individual Office apps, and on Microsoft365.com (formerly Office.com).
OneDrive Home defaults to your Recent files view. This view is now available in the Teams
Files app, File Explorer and on Microsoft365.com.
Let’s take a look at what you can do once you’re in the Recent view. If you want to quickly share or favorite a file, you can do it easily, by hovering on the file name and selecting the respective option.
The share and favorite options appear when hovering on a file in OneDrive.
If you’re looking to get back to a specific file, you can apply quick filters to the Recent view. You can filter by file type including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF.
Filters let you quickly narrow your view to a single file type on OneDrive Home.
You can also see the file activity, such as comments, shares, edits, and views, giving you an at-a-glance way to catch up on what's happened in a document since you last opened it.
The Activity column helps you see the latest actions performed on a file by you or your co-workers.
The OneDrive Home experience and Recent view are available for work and school accounts today. To try it, just sign-in to Microsoft365.com and navigate to OneDrive, or sign in to OneDrive for Web.
Faster file access
With the introduction of OneDrive Home we’ve observed a boost in efficiency when it comes to finding and accessing your files. Our data shows that over 50% of files opened from Home happen within 10 seconds of visiting OneDrive. In comparison, just 32% of files are opened within 10 seconds in “My files” view which displays a list of folders and files. We’ve also observed an 8.5% increase in the number of users interacting with shared content. The new experience helps you locate and access files quickly, making you more efficient.
For a deeper dive into OneDrive Home tune in to the Sync Up Podcast episode "A New Home for OneDrive."
What’s next for OneDrive?
Over the next few months we’ll be adding more features and enhancements to the OneDrive Home experience. Stay tuned... we'll post regular feature deep dives and updates here on the OneDrive blog.
If you have questions or comments, please leave them below. Additionally, commercial customers are welcome to join OneDrive Customer Office Hours, a monthly Microsoft Teams meeting where our product team will answer your questions, demo new features, and get your feedback. To get on the meeting invite list, just sign up for OneDrive Customer Office Hours.
Thank you for choosing OneDrive.
About the author
Liz Scoble is a Senior Product Manager on the OneDrive Web team. She joined the team in October 2021, and has been focused on building delightful and easy to use files experiences. Liz lives in Seattle, WA, where she enjoys the beautiful nature and doesn’t mind the rain too much. In her spare time, she loves rock climbing and volunteers as an instructor for a local climbing group. In the winter months, you can usually find her in the kitchen testing out a new baking recipe or working on a puzzle.