Folders & Artifact Organization

Folders let you group documents, workbooks, views, and other content inside a project. This guide covers creating folders, moving things into them, renaming, and deleting.

Ask the Agent

The quickest way to organize a project:

Create a folder called Reports and move the Q4 docs into it.

Obvious creates the folder, finds the matching artifacts, and moves them — all in one step. You can also ask things like:

Rename the Strategy folder to 2026 Strategy.

Delete the empty Drafts folder.

The agent handles nesting too. "Create a folder called Financials inside Reports" works exactly the way you'd expect.

Create a Folder

1. Open the project sidebar on the left.
2. Click the + button at the top of the sidebar and select New Folder.
3. Type a name for the folder and press Enter.

The folder appears in the sidebar. To create a folder inside another folder, right-click the parent folder and select New Folder.

Move Content into a Folder

1. In the sidebar, drag any artifact onto a folder to move it in.

That's it. You can also move multiple items at once — hold Shift or Cmd (Mac) / Ctrl (Windows) to select several artifacts, then drag them into the folder.

To move something back to the top level, drag it out of the folder and drop it in the empty area of the sidebar.

Rename a Folder

Right-click the folder in the sidebar and select Rename. Type the new name and press Enter.

Delete a Folder

Right-click the folder and select Delete.

Warning: Deleting a folder that still has content inside it removes the folder and everything in it. Move anything you want to keep before deleting.

Empty folders delete immediately with no confirmation.

Rename an Artifact

Artifact names must be unique within the same folder. If you try to rename an artifact to a name that's already taken in that folder, Obvious blocks the rename and opens a dialog so you can choose a different name.

The uniqueness check is per folder and per artifact type — so a document and a workbook can share the same name in the same folder, and the same name can appear in two different folders without any conflict.

Note: This applies to all artifact types: documents, workbooks, presentations, views, and others.

Tidy Up

Tidy Up lets Obvious automatically organize your project for you. Instead of moving things one by one, you trigger it once and Obvious reviews everything — then creates folders, moves artifacts into them, renames anything with an unclear name, and removes empty folders.

To run Tidy Up, right-click anywhere in the project area and select Tidy Up. You can also use the keyboard shortcut ⇧⌘O, or open the ⋯ menu next to the project name and select Tidy Up.

Tidy Up runs in the background — you can keep working while it goes. When it finishes, a notification tells you how many items were organized. If your project is already organized, it says so and makes no changes.

After Tidy Up completes, you have 10 seconds to undo everything in one step. The undo option appears in the notification — click it to restore your project to exactly how it was before.

Note: Tidy Up only moves, renames, and groups things — it doesn't delete your data. If it suggests archiving an artifact it thinks is outdated, it only acts on ones it's confident about. You can always move things manually afterward if you prefer a different arrangement.

Tips

• Folders can nest inside other folders — there's no depth limit.
• Moving an artifact into a folder doesn't change the artifact itself. Your data, formatting, and sharing links stay the same.
• Folders are project-level. Each project has its own folder structure.
• Artifact names only need to be unique within the same folder. The same name can exist in different folders.