New Year, New Look for OneDrive for Personal Use

[Miceile Barrett]

OneDrive has a brand-new update that makes it faster and more intuitive than ever before. With a sleek new interface and powerful new features, OneDrive is here to help you simplify your life and get more done in less time.

It’s both a visual and functional upgrade designed to help you get to your files quickly and keep your content organized in multiple ways – without you having to do any organizing. The new features and upgraded design make it faster to get to all your personal and shared files in OneDrive so you can focus your time on things that matter most to you. All changes will be available to all customers by the end of February.

Fast, organized, and personalized

With the updated OneDrive, your content takes center stage. The improved visual design reduces clutter and distractions, allowing you to focus on what's important – your content. Spend less time finding files and more time doing what you need with the improved OneDrive. These changes are consistent throughout the app, providing a seamless and consistent experience.

People View

We know there are lots of important people in your life - from friends and family to members of your community. When life gets busy with all the activities going on, from school to soccer practices, it can often be easier to remember who sent you a file instead of the file name. We’ve created a new People view to match how you see the world – based on the people you spend your time with.

People view: The new view organizes files by the people in your life you collaborate with

Filtering by file type

Single click filtering to find the content you need

Find your content faster than ever before! With our new file filters, you can quickly find what you need with just a single click. Whether you're looking for a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint presentation, or PDF file, our filters make it easy to narrow down your view to the exact file type you need. And, once you’ve filtered your view to a certain file type you can then search within that view to find the exact file you need.

Simple commands, always available

We've streamlined creation for both uploading to OneDrive and starting a new document. The “add new” button has been upgraded to include both options, and it persists across all views. So, when you are inspired to create something new, you can get into your flow faster.

Upload and create content from one consistent place in OneDrive.

View all commands on a file or folder by clicking on the context menu.

Taken together these features will reduce the time it takes you to get to a file, reduce the stress of finding files, and save you time. This new experience is currently rolling out to customers and will be generally available to all customers by the end of February. To access OneDrive, sign in to your account or sign up for free here!

We welcome your feedback. Feel free to comment below or share and vote on ideas in the OneDrive feedback portal.

About the Author

Miceile (prounced Ma-kay-la) Barrett

Miceile is a Principal Product Manager on the OneDrive and Microsoft Lists products. She has been working at Microsoft since 2016 where she started her career on SharePoint Team Sites. Her focus is making Microsoft Lists and OneDrive fast, easy to use, and powerful for all users. Outside of work, Miceile resides in Seattle and enjoys spending her time in the mountains ski touring and hiking, practicing vinyasa yoga, and traveling with her friends and family!

[AlessioT89]

Please, stop to remove system accent colour from titlebar in applications, it is meant to highlight what application is in focus.

[maisondasilva]

Thank you for this update, I can't wait to test this new version!

[Do66o]

Please remove the premium upgrade button.
Such functionality should be placed in the settings.
Why does MS always promote such heavy-handed methods?
And when it gets criticized by many users and becomes a big problem, the usual pattern is to apologize and withdraw, which is very lame.

[PSteinmetz]

Werde es sofort ausprobieren.

[yuguuk]

@Do66opremium upgrade button is repeated in two places; the left panel and also at top right corner. A collapsible left panel can increase the screen real estate on smaller screens like laptops. Aggressive marketing to the detriment of usability seems counterproductive.

[maisondasilva]

@Miceile Barrett Any news on dark mode for personal accounts?

[Shanthilal]

Good, a much awaited upgrade. Also awaiting & requesting feature loaded upgrades in the OneDrive android app. 

[HotCakeX]

Love the new design, really nice!

[alshibani4774]

Very good

[Jamies666]

Hi there Miceile,

Thank you for the post .

I have been using OneDrive for many years,
As a corporate business technician,
and now as a personal user -
Family organiser.

I have been reporting the problems with the browser access to the facility using all the pathways I could find, but still find that there are great difficulties with the interface.

with a slow upload speed I have found tat frequently uploads need overnight sessions.
And, then inthe morning, maybe several hours to deal with the problems

The failure details on the screen (right-hand panel) do not give much of the name of failed files.
The facility does not offer options to retry failed files unless they can be specifically identified and the command re entered.

If a filename is already in use the option is to discard the upload (may have taken 2 or more hours processing before the user of the name is checked.
other option - to add the upload as a new file - different end to the name, different upload/file date/time,
No option to overwrite the file with the same name & creation/last update date/time.

And the occasional report that a file was not uploaded as I do not have the authority to write it to the store ! ????
But the file may have been 1 of a folder-full of files on my PC and almost all the others were written -
and all in the same session.
even better -
If I can identify the file from the part of the filename given,
just selecting it and selection the upload process (drag-n-drop)
will usually get it uploaded -
and that is the same file, unaltered, from the same folder
using the same logon session to the same OneDrive folder ! ????????????

Then - go looking to see what has been uploaded so the missing ones can be reloaded

Have to carefully, and slowly page through the presented files -
page down too fast and not all the files on OneDrive are added to the presented list.
Now checking the files on the OneDrive against the list that should be there
have to select "RENAME" to get to see (be able to scroll through the right hand part of filenames longer than about 30 characters
so the parts of my partition backup are all presented with the part-number missing on the list, and usually the datetimestamp of the backup set too !

Then there was the debacle of the message telling me the old OneDrive App was being discontinued, and I needed the new one -
3 days of the old backup PC not responding to mouse or keyboard input as the names of the files I can access on the family's OneDrive storage are added to a folder in my /used/ area of the PC's OS partition MFT
And then many hours of the App linking the entry in the MFS to the file on the OneDrive -
Yes there is an option not to link - but you cannot get at that until all the file links have been setup !

So - I have a complete list of all the families files under my user-ID
I don't want that - it makes file explorer so slow with all the extra entries in the MFT
Good that as a "Tech", I thought it would be better to check what "linked" means -
seems that if I had deleted the entries in that folder under my ID, all the files would have been deleted from the OneDrive store.

My data files, my sets of backups of partition images,
the backup sets of images of the family's systems,
the data the family members had uploaded to get space on their systems to allow windows-update to function,
The files that makeup their working environment - and for some who had Sync'd the entire OS partition, the OS files too !

Then there is the I7 laptop I use for general work -
about 20 minutes of a totally unresponsive system, black screen,
where the only way I knew things were happening was the Hub lights flashing

After the long wait - the system started up and allowed me to login - and get an occasional response as it too went through the folder setup, MFT load, and linking.
Then, I could unlink that folder structure, and verify that deleting files from the MFT folder within the /User/ area did not get the files removed from the OneDrive store, and then from my PC partitions.

So - having had the family members remove the App from their PC's
panic not, just take evasive actions mode
they have virtually ceased using OneDrive.

I would ask that Microsoft deal with the problems I have reported about the Personal user version of OneDrive.
And add a storage space limitation (Quota) facility to the share option where the "owner" can give write permission to a user -
that is without finding the permitted folder is now occupying all the available space allowed to the owning ID.
As in 1TB - share folder /thekidsstuff/ with the kids - but only allow that folder to occupy say - 100GB of the 1TB space.

And, perhaps you can get the backup facilities - File History and system image facilities sorted out to be safe and reliable to use.
file history should use the longer names option so that files with windows "long names" of above 220 characters - and up to the 255 character limit will be saved.
Also allow backup check frequencies to be set by foldername -
Maybe check at a specified set of intervals 10 minutes, 20, 30, 60, 120, 240, 480 minutes, and daily/weekly. for files in the folders with datetimestamps showing file change within the interval
That being so that the files a user is frequently updating can be saved in line with their updating - and those infrequently updated (outlook archives?) only saved at daily intervals
- So that the system does not take 48 copies of a 5GB archive every day.

And re system image
Great - you have an image of the partition(s0
edit a file, and that replacers the copy in the image.
Then notice the file is missing a great amount of data, or has been replaced with a malware package distributor -
and that is the version in the image.

Ideally, an incremental set should be created with the user advised when the incremental sets reach a user set limit of storage used.
The advisory being - either "point the facility to another storage location for a new base set, or increase te space allowed for the system image and incremental sets.
with the facility acquiring, and reserving the indicated space.

Jamies666

[jtelmfarm]

My pet hate - across Windows - is still there:

Share defaults to anyone can edit, and there is no obvious way to change the default to view only. 

Please Microsoft, not everybody team works in an organisation. A lot of the time the last thing that one wants is to take the risk of somebody, deliberately or inadvertently, messing up a precious file. 

Allowing the default for sharing files to be changed would be a minor step in programming, and a major step in convenience.