A common challenge that organizations face is that people struggle to find relevant content that already exists, so they make their own, causing duplicates and confusion. To help you address this challenge, Looker provides many ways to organize content to make it more discoverable to others at your organization, including the ability to create and share folders within your Looker instance. To see the organizational structure of folders in your Looker instance, you can expand the Folders menu on the left side navigation panel of the Looker UI. Under Folders, you'll typically see Shared, which contain all folder shared across an organization, My folder, which is your personal folder, and All folders, which shows all folders that you have access to in your Looker instance. Now, depending on the settings configured by your Looker admin, it's common for the Shared folders page to be set as the homepage for users as shown in this example. All shared folders that are accessible to you will appear at the top of the Shared folders page under the header called Folders. Of course, if you've been granted the permission to create new folders in your Looker instance, you can create a new shared folder by clicking on the "New" button in the top right-hand corner next to the gear menu icon. A new window will open for you to name the new folder. The new shared folder will be visible to all users within your Looker instance that can access items within Shared folders. A best practice when creating a new shared folder is to try to ensure the overall folder structure remains clear and intuitive. In this example, there's a folder for each business team or unit so if you need to know more about professional services, current projects, it's clear where you need to go. Of course, the appropriate folder names and the structure will differ by organization, but the objective of promoting discoverability and ease of use is key for all organizations. Remember, the goal of the shared folder is to make the content stored there as easy to find and use as possible. Be sure to take a moment to review the existing shared folder structure as you decide when and where to create new folders and their appropriate names. The next folder type under folders is labeled My folder. In Looker, all users are provided with their own personal folder as a scratch location to work with content. Within my folder, you'll see items that you've created and stored in your personal folder, including looks and dashboards, as well as sub folders that you may have created. While your personal folder is intended to be your own space for works in progress and other items you may not need to share, other users within a Looker instance can be granted access to your personal folder if needed by the Looker administrators. Just like in the shared folders, you can click on "New" within My folder to create a new folder if you have the permission to do so. Again, a new window will open for you to name the new folder. Last, the option for All folders is useful to easily and quickly see all of the folders that you have access to within your Looker instance. The All folders page provides links to share folders as well as other user's personal folders within the People folder. From here, you can navigate to any of these folders within your Looker organization as long as you've been granted access to them. In summary, with these various folder options, Looker or makes it easy for you to manage your content, so it's readily discoverable and usable by others at your organization. Have fun exploring the folders in your Looker's instance.
