Folders

A folder is a page whose only job is to hold other pages. It has no editor — opening one shows the list of its children instead of a text surface.

What you can do

• Create a folder from the + button in the sidebar and pick Folder in the dialog that opens.
• Nest a folder inside another folder by dragging it in the sidebar; drag children up and down to set the order siblings appear in.
• Drop one or more files onto a folder in the sidebar and they become child File pages at the spot you dropped them.
• Open a folder to see its contents as a list or a grid, sorted by title, type, created date, or last-updated date.

How it works

A folder is the same kind of page as your documents, sheets, and chats — one row in the drive's page tree, with a parent and a list of children. What makes it a folder is that it has no body: instead of rendering an editor, a folder renders the list of pages that sit under it. Any page type can be a child of a folder, and folders nest inside folders up to 100 levels deep — past that, the tree refuses the move.

Sibling order is stored per-parent. Dragging a page up or down in the sidebar moves it between its neighbours, and the sidebar tree honours that drag order from then on. The folder's own list view ignores it: it sorts by title by default, and the sort by title / type / updated / created controls switch the column it sorts on. Sort is per-view and not remembered across sessions.

Dropping files onto a folder creates a File page per file under that folder, in the order you dropped them. Classification, text extraction, and OCR happen in the background, as described in Files & Uploads. You can keep working — the tree shows each new child as soon as it's stored.

Permissions on a folder apply to the folder page itself. Granting someone view or edit on a folder does not walk down to its children — each page checks its own grants plus drive membership. See Sharing & Permissions for the full resolution rules.

Good to know

• Folder access doesn't cascade. A view or edit grant on a folder lets someone open the folder page itself — nothing more. Each child page is checked on its own grants, so sharing a folder never accidentally shares the tree beneath it.

Related

• Pages — the universal container; folders are one of the nine page types.
• Files & Uploads — what happens after a dropped file lands as a child File page.
• Sharing & Permissions — why a grant on a folder doesn't reach the pages inside it.
• Drives & Workspaces — the drive that a folder's tree belongs to.
• Search — how results span a drive rather than a single folder.