Quick Access/Home View Incorrect – Frequent Folders & Recent Files Are Grouped Together

By default, the Frequent Folders and Recent Files are grouped separately in the Quick Access (now known as “Home”) folder. Occasionally, on some systems, the Quick access view may appear incorrectly (e.g., the Frequent Folders and Recent Files items get mixed up and show under a single category) due to folder views corruption.

The following is the default Quick access folder view:

The following image depicts the problem where the frequent folders and recent files are grouped together.

Here is a variation of this problem, where the items are mixed up; they can neither be grouped separately nor be sorted by Type.

On Windows 11, the “Home” view may appear like below (i.e., the frequent folders and recent files are grouped under a single category named “Unspecified”) due to the corrupt folder view settings:

quick access "home" view incorrect - grouped together

The items are grouped under a single category named “Unspecified”.

Resolution

To fix the Quick access (“Home”) view, close all folder windows except the one with the Quick access or Home view showing.

Important: Before following these steps, ensure you’re in the Quick Access (“Home”) view, and NOT in This PC view.



Right-click the Quick access star icon, and click Options.

In Windows 11, click on the ellipsis button (a button that has three dots ) in the command bar, and click Options. This opens the Folder Options dialog.

Click the View tab, and click Reset Folders

Click OK when you see the following prompt:

Do you want to reset all folders of this type to the default view settings?

This resets the folder views for Quick access (in Windows 10) and “Home” (in Windows 11). The above steps will not reset the customizations for other folders.

If the above steps don’t help, reset the folder views completely (for all folders) using the method described in the article How to Reset Folder Views.


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Ramesh Srinivasan is passionate about Microsoft technologies and he has been a consecutive ten-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award in the Windows Shell/Desktop Experience category, from 2003 to 2012. He loves to troubleshoot and write about Windows. Ramesh founded Winhelponline.com in 2005.

22 thoughts on “Quick Access/Home View Incorrect – Frequent Folders & Recent Files Are Grouped Together”

  1. brilliant – microsoft buggered up my pc after 1809 update,
    Tip if PC slow replace HDD with SSD – mine now 15 secs and its ready
    Thanks

    Reply
  2. You saved me! This is the only article I could find that explained how to fix this problem with my Quick Access folder. I wonder why Windows 10 does this?

    Reply
  3. PERMANENT FIX
    If this bug for you occurs repeatedly every day, after you clicked button “Reset Folders” as shown above in the article, do this additional step: click also “Apply to Folder” to save it as the default view for this kind of folder.
    It should fix it permanently and shouldn’t happen anymore from my personal experience!

    Reply
  4. Thank you. The steps to do this little change, seems easy…. But turns that if you don’t execute the right options… you change things that you do not expect to change.. Again thanks

    Reply
    • @Zayn: Were you in the Quick access folder view before accessing the Folder Options? Also, can you post a screenshot?

  5. Thanks a lot for this hint. I still have no idea how I ended up in this situation in the first place, but at least I was able to get out of it again. Some aspects of Microsoft Windows are strange.

    Reply
  6. Brilliant! It’s so easy … once you know it. Apparently the “Quick Access” view can break in multiple ways, so a search engine will often yield unsuitable results, but this tip of yours helped me in my particular case.

    Reply
  7. Thanks Ramesh! This works but keeps happening. It seems to happen each time Microsoft updates Win 10 but I’m not really sure that’s it.

    Reply

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