Searching and Sorting Files Made Easy

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated October 24, 2013)

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Google Drive makes it easy to upload and work with all sorts of documents. After a while, you may end up with dozens, scores, or hundreds of documents, spreadsheets, and what-have-you in Drive. That can make it a bit of a challenge to figure out how to find the documents you want to use.

Fortunately, Drive makes it rather easy to search and sort documents, all with the intent of making it easy to find specific ones. For instance, here's how to find the files on which you last worked:

  1. Log into Google Drive (drive.google.com).
  2. At the left side of the screen, click on Recent. Google sorts your files by the Last Opened by Me date, shown at the right side of the screen.

It really is that simple—just two steps. With the files sorted in this manner, you can easily locate the recently used file you want to work with.

Google Drive doesn't limit you just to this method of sorting, though. You can click the Sort tool, near the right side of the toolbar, to further sort your files. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Using the Sort tool to order files in Drive.

The options available through the Sort tool are context-sensitive. They are dependent on what option you have selected at the left side of the screen. For instance, if you have Recent clicked at the left side of the screen, the Sort options available are different than if you have My Drive clicked.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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What is 6 - 4?

2015-06-03 16:22:11

Joseph Dunn

Ms. Lisa Pohlmeyer...
get used to customized searches from the omnibox(the box that you type in everything on the top in Chrome)...
and make one just for Google Drive like this
what to call it: Google Drive Folder.
Keyboard shortcut: F
URL: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/#search?q=type%3Afolder%20%s

I use this all the time and within the omnibox you just do this...
type: f
then hit: tab
then any part of the name of the folder
like let's say your file name is john philip sousza and you've got a million john folders, just type the last name souza and you'll weed out all the other john's. it's very customary.

It works wonderfully.

2014-12-29 17:42:42

Lisa Pohlmeyer

If I want to search a Drive folder (not all of Drive) for a file or folder whose name contains "glass", how do I do that?

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