Thank you!!

This suggests that you were genuine in not knowing. But had you never done a quick web search? It's the kind of thing that I'd feel compelled to find whether I could change the behavior to fit what I would prefer.

Anyway, if you're unaware, here are a couple useful shortcuts for kbd-driven navigation: Command-Down (arrow) to dig one level down the file tree and Command-Up (arrow) to move to the enclosing directory / folder. I use it many times a day all day long.

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muppetman 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The problem I've been having is that in Word "Recents" is selected by default. So I pull down that menu and it's useless (full of random Recent folders) The comment above made me realise if I pick "Documents" in the left hand side, that top menu changes from having a bunch of useless "Recents" in it and exposes the filesystem.

No I've never thought to Google how to use the Finder - it seems like that one thing that should be super intutitve - I've never had to Google how to use any other filesystem manager, Windows or Linux. Or iOS. Or Android.

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hotdog1492 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

“Recents” is not Finder. That’s actually Microsoft’s useleas UI. It would be far more usable if they did just open the real system file picker. (Msft messed this up on Windows too.)

	▲	muppetman 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yea so it seems my frustrations come from not understanding the file picker isn't the finder. Anyway I've learnt a few things, so thanks everyone. I feel less powerless now.

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anon7000 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

But this is like the same as windows explorer right? It opens whatever view you used for the app (say, “recents”) and then you click something in the sidebar to go to the “real” filesystem?

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hn8726 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I also didn't know how to do that, and I'm certain that I've looked it up at some point. It's just so unintuitive that I'd need to do it daily to remember