53

I tried Google Drive today and promptly noticed that the "organize" feature of Google Docs went from a multi-selectable checkbox (in which you can check multiple collections for a document to be "in"):

Organize in Google Docs

To what (appears to be) a single select version:

Organize in Google Drive

Personally I loved the flexible concept of document collections.

Am I missing something?

Is there another view that allows me to have that same document collection support?

I realize that you can't have the same file in two folders, but I really didn't expect to loose organizational power/configuration just by giving it a "try".

1
  • How long has that been like that. Google used to have tags that you can more obviously have >1 tag per folder.
    – justintime
    Jan 7, 2014 at 10:31

3 Answers 3

44

While in "organize" hold down the Control key for Windows or the Command key for Mac to select multiple places for your content to be "in".

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  • 1
    Excellent. This does work for me. Is there an official documentation on this somewhere?
    – el2iot2
    Apr 25, 2012 at 23:04
  • 4
    Here is official documentation: support.google.com/drive/bin/…
    – el2iot2
    Apr 26, 2012 at 19:35
  • 10
    Thanks for the answer. What utterly terrible UI design... Oct 10, 2012 at 16:15
  • 1
    is this info still current. I can't seem to get it to give me a checkbox.
    – justintime
    Jan 10, 2014 at 12:18
  • 2
    I'm not sure this is still possible with the "New Google Drive" that has been rolling out slowly. Anybody else have the new drive and have any luck? (If I revert to the old drive, I can still use the trick in this answer)
    – MrSlippers
    Jul 17, 2014 at 18:32
14

as of 2018-08-31

To add selected items to an additional folder via the keyboard:

  1. Select one (or more) item(s) in drive
  2. Press Shift+z
  3. Use , , , in the resulting popup to navigate to the desired folder
  4. Press Enter to add the items to the desired folder

Note: You can use the mouse for most of this, but the initial Shift+z is needed to start things off this way.

1
  • 3
    These are good answers, but in my opinion you should avoid this (using multiple labels) IF you sync Google Drive to your local computer, ie. using the client app. I believe that Google made this functionality hard to find when they launched those client apps since it doesn't map well to the way people use local file systems.
    – Tom
    May 7, 2017 at 16:51
4

as of 2018-08-31

To move selected items to a new folder and then toggle to adding selected items to an additional folder via the keyboard:

  1. Select one (or more) item(s) in drive
  2. Press z
  3. Use , , , in the resulting popup to navigate to the desired folder
  4. Press Ctrl to make the "Move Here" button toggle to "Add Here"
  5. Press Enter to add the selected items here

To move selected items to a new folder and then toggle to adding selected items to an additional folder via the mouse:

  1. Select one (or more) item(s) in drive
  2. Right Click on the selection and choose "Move To..."
  3. Use the mouse in the resulting popup to navigate to the desired folder
  4. Press Ctrl to make the "Move Here" button toggle to "Add Here"
  5. Click the "Add Here" button to add the selected items

1
  • The answer is basically the as the Shift + z shortcut, as both are about the "Add item to folder" feature. Please consider to merge the content of both answers.
    – Rubén
    Feb 7, 2017 at 12:00

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