Module 6 of StartCloud's Microsoft 365: Everyday Skills learning pathway, in five short units with a knowledge check: searching across email, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams at once instead of hunting folder by folder, naming files so future you can find them (dates that sort, no final_v3), the Recent and Shared views that beat any folder, and why a deep folder tree stopped being the right answer once search got good.
Finding It Again
Ask once, instead of hunting folder by folder
Think about the last time you went looking for a document. There is a good chance you opened a folder, then another folder, then a third, decided it was probably in the other place, went there, came back, and eventually found it about four minutes later in the first place you looked.
That is not a memory problem. It is what happens when you navigate to things instead of asking for them. Microsoft 365 has a single search that reaches across your email, your OneDrive, the SharePoint sites you belong to and your Teams files, all at once, and it is sitting in the bar at the top of nearly every app you use. Ask once, rather than hunting in six places.
This is the question everyone is too polite to ask, so here it is answered. Searching does not give you access to anything, and it never shows you files you were not already allowed to open. Payroll stays invisible to you, and your half-written resignation letter stays invisible to everyone else. Search reads permissions, it does not change them.
That is not a fault. Results are ranked around you: what you have access to, what you have been working on lately, and who you work with most. It is why a colleague swearing they found it in two seconds is not much help to you, and why your own results tend to get better the more you use it.
The words in a Word document, a PDF, a spreadsheet, the body of an email, all of it is searchable. So if you cannot remember what a file was called but you remember a phrase in it, or the client's name, or the job number, that is genuinely enough to go on.
Alongside each result you get who changed it last, when they changed it, and where it lives. That is usually how you pick between three files with almost the same name, and it is information a folder listing never gave you.
Search pays attention to where you are standing when you ask. Search from inside Outlook and you get email, because that is what is around you. Search from inside a SharePoint site and you get that site's pages and files. If you want the whole lot at once, search from the Microsoft 365 start page in your browser, the one that shows your recent files when you sign in. So when a search comes back with nothing and you are certain the thing exists, the first question is not "what did I call it", it is "where was I standing".
Everyone knows the file called final_v3_REAL. Some of us have made one this month. It happens because a file name is written by the person who has the whole job in their head, and read months later by someone who has none of it, and that someone is very often you.
There is one rule underneath all of this, and everything else follows from it: name the file for the person searching for it, not for the moment you are saving it. A minute of thought now saves twenty minutes of hunting later, usually on a day when you have no minutes to spare.
- 2026-08-13 Fremantle Cafe quote
- Nolan Group service agreement signed
- Safety induction v2 draft
- 2026-07 monthly report BOARD
- Quote final_v3_REAL_USE_THIS.docx
- Document1 (2) copy.docx
- 13-8-26 notes.docx
- asdf.xlsx
Put the date first, biggest part first
Write dates as year, then month, then day: 2026-08-13. Computers sort text from the left, so a whole folder of files named this way falls into date order all on its own, and it stays that way forever. Write it as 13-8-26 and the folder sorts by the day of the month, which is how you end up with January sitting next to October.
- 2026-08-13 sorts itself, 13-8-26 does not
- It also removes the Australian and American date argument entirely
- Only put a date in the name when the date is part of what the thing is
Stop writing version numbers in the name
This is the one that surprises people. Every file in OneDrive and SharePoint keeps its own version history, so the older versions are already saved and you can open or restore any of them from the file's own menu. That means v3_final was never doing anything except making the file harder to find, and creating a second file when what you wanted was a later draft of the first one.
- Edit the one file, and let version history hold the past
- Use words like draft or approved if the state matters to people
- One live file with a clear name beats five files with dramatic ones
Say what it is and who it is for
The most useful file names answer two questions in about six words: what is this, and who or what is it about. Client or job name, then the kind of document. Skip anything the folder or the site already tells you, and skip anything so generic it could describe half the business.
- Client or job name, then the type of document
- Do not repeat the folder name inside the file name
- Short is kind: the whole path plus file name has a length limit, and deep folders eat most of it
A naming habit only pays off when more than one person uses it. It does not need a policy document. Ten minutes in a team meeting, one example everybody agrees looks right, and a note stuck somewhere people will see it. Consistency is worth far more than cleverness here, and the simplest pattern the team will actually follow beats the perfect one they will not.
There is a set of views sitting down the left-hand side of OneDrive and the Microsoft 365 start page that most people scroll straight past, and between them they answer the majority of "where is that thing" questions faster than search does, because you do not even have to think of a word.
Recent
A list of the files you have actually opened lately, pulled together from your OneDrive, from SharePoint sites and from Teams, without you going to any of them. For the work in front of you right now, this is almost always the fastest route there is, because the thing you want is usually the thing you touched yesterday.
- It follows you between devices, so the same list is on your phone
- It does not care which site or team the file lives in
- Best for this week's work, less useful for something from March
Shared
Everything other people have shared with you, in one list, plus what you have shared out. This is where the file goes when a colleague sends you a link and you close the message without thinking. It is not gone, it is in Shared, and knowing that saves the slightly awkward request for them to send it again.
- Look here before asking someone to resend a link
- The shared-by-you side is a quick sanity check on what you have handed out
- Works the same on the web and in the mobile app
Your team libraries, from inside OneDrive
OneDrive is not only your own files. From the OneDrive web page and the mobile app you can reach the SharePoint and Teams libraries you have access to as well, which means one starting point for everything rather than a bookmark for every site. Most people never notice this and spend years navigating to each site separately.
- Your own files and the team's files in the same place
- Handy on a phone, where hunting through sites is genuinely painful
- A file can be moved from your own library to a team one when the team takes it over
Recent first, because this week's work lives there. Then Shared, if somebody else sent it to you. Then search, with the client name or a phrase you remember from inside the document. Folders last, and only when you genuinely know where the thing lives. Doing it in that order turns a four-minute hunt into about fifteen seconds, and it is the whole of this module in one sentence.
Somewhere in most Australian businesses there is a folder structure built around 2014, on a server in a cupboard, by someone thorough. It has a logic to it. It has depth. It has a folder called Old, and inside that a folder called Old 2, and everyone has quietly agreed not to look in there.
That structure was not a mistake. Folders were the only way to find anything, because search on a file server was slow, could not see inside documents, and frequently just gave up. If you did not know where you put something, it was gone. So people got very good at building trees, and the tree was the map.
Search could barely read file names, so the only way back to a document was remembering the path you saved it down. Deep, careful folders were genuinely the right answer.
It reads inside documents, knows who touched them and when, ranks results around your own work, and only ever shows you things you already have access to. The map stopped being the only way home.
Folders still matter, but their job changed. They are there to make things obvious to a human at a glance, not to be the only route in. Two or three levels, plain names, and let search do the rest.
- A file can only live in one folder, so anything that belongs to two projects gets copied, and now there are two
- The right folder is only obvious to the person who built the tree, and they are often on leave
- New starters cannot guess it, so they invent their own branch, and the tree grows a second head
- Deep folders plus long file names run into a real limit: the whole path can only be so long before files stop syncing properly
That last one is not folklore. OneDrive and SharePoint limit how long a full path can be, counting every folder name plus the file name, and a nine-deep folder chain with descriptive names will find the edge of it eventually. The symptom is a file that refuses to sync or open, and nobody ever guesses the cause.
Nobody is asking you to restructure a decade of files. Big reorganisations usually break links other people were relying on and burn a Saturday for very little. Just improve the folder you happen to be standing in. Name the next file well. When you make a new folder, keep it shallow and call it something a new starter would understand. Small and steady genuinely wins this one.
And if your business is still running a shared drive that nobody quite understands, that is a normal place to be, not something to be embarrassed about. It is also the sort of thing worth sorting properly once, with someone who has done it before, rather than one heroic weekend at a time.
- Microsoft Learn: Overview of Microsoft Search
- Microsoft Learn: Search experiences in SharePoint
- Microsoft Learn: Intro to file collaboration in Microsoft 365
- Microsoft Learn: SharePoint limits, including file path length
- Microsoft Support: Restrictions and limitations in OneDrive and SharePoint
Details were current at the time of writing (August 2026). Microsoft moves the layout of these apps around fairly often, so we have described what to look for rather than exact click paths. The links above are always the freshest word.
Knowledge check
5 quick questions. Get 4 right and the module is yours.
1. You search Microsoft 365 for a client's name. What are you going to see?
2. Which file name will still make sense to somebody else in a year?
3. Why write dates as 2026-08-13 rather than 13-8-26?
4. A colleague shared a file with you last week, you closed the message, and now you need it. Fastest move?
5. Why has a deep folder tree stopped being the right answer for finding files?