Windows 10 tip: Make the File Explorer navigation pane work like classic Windows Explorer

The Show All Folders option changes the arrangement of the File Explorer navigation pane.

Click to enlarge

In Windows 10, the navigation pane on the left side of File Explorer shows a group of nodes, all at the same level: Quick Access, OneDrive and other connected cloud accounts, This PC, Network, and so on.

But if you prefer to move through the file system using old-school hierarchical trees, you can configure the navigation pane to support that preference. Right-click any empty space in the navigation pane and click Show All Folders to see this option. (It's a toggle, so if you don't like the effect, just click Show All Folders again to remove the checkmark and restore the default navigation pane.)

With Show All Folders selected, the navigation pane displays only two nodes: Quick Access remains at the top; below it is a Desktop node that expands to show different locations using a tree-style view.

You can see the results in the screenshot here, where the default arrangement is on the left and All Folders view is on the right.

No matter which option you choose, Quick Access remains at the top, where you can pin shortcuts to the folders, drives, and cloud storage locations you use most frequently and see a list of recently access files and folders.

Right-click any folder icon to pin it to Quick Access, then drag pinned items up or down to your preferred order. Folders you've used recently appear at the bottom of the Frequent Folders list; to remove any of these automatically added items, right-click the icon and then click Remove from Quick Access.

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