Stop Folder Mining: How Metadata Can Save Your Business Hours Every Week

Stop Folder Mining: How Metadata Can Save Your Team Hours Every Week

Do you ever find yourself endlessly clicking through folders, trying to figure out where the final version of a file lives—or what it’s even called? If so, you’re not alone. Your employees are probably doing the same thing, and it’s costing your business more time than you realize.

Here’s a question worth asking: how much time does your team spend searching for files each week? Now stretch that across a year. The answer is likely staggering.

We’ve been talking a lot about Microsoft Copilot lately, and in one of our sessions on getting ready for Copilot, metadata came up as a key topic. It deserves its own spotlight. Today, we’re taking a break from Copilot (just briefly) to show you how metadata can eliminate folder mining for good.

Why Folders Are Failing You

Metadata has been available in SharePoint since 2001, yet many businesses still treat document libraries like shared drives from the 1990s. That’s a missed opportunity.

Let’s say you’re a financial services firm. You might have a folder called “Client Documents,” with subfolders for each client, then subfolders for each year, and then another layer for document types like “Taxes.”

That means every document is buried three folders deep. You’ve tagged it with the client name, the year, and the document type—but you’ve also made your team hunt through three layers to find it.

No wonder McKinsey found in a 2012 study that employees spend 19% of their day searching for information.

Metadata to the Rescue

Metadata flips the script. Instead of folders, imagine your files laid out like a spreadsheet. Each file is a row, and each column describes it—client name, year, document type, etc.

Want Hank Reardon’s 2025 tax documents? Filter by year, then by document type, then by client name. Or just type “Hank Reardon Tax 2025” into the search bar. Done.

Even better, if you’re using Copilot, you can simply ask:

“Hey Copilot, how much capital gains tax did Hank Reardon pay in 2025?”

Copilot will find the answer—no folder diving required.

Views: The Hidden Power of SharePoint

Here’s where it gets really good. SharePoint lets you create custom views. You can build a view that filters for tax documents from the current year and groups them by client. Each quarter, just click the view—no sorting, no searching.

These views can be embedded in dashboards, Teams channels, and across Microsoft 365. And yes, Copilot loves metadata. It uses metadata first to understand your files, making its responses faster and more accurate.