How to Stop Windows 11 from Automatically Suggesting Files in the File Explorer Home Page

When you open File Explorer in Windows 11, you are no longer greeted by a simple list of your hard drives. Instead, you land on the “Home” page, which is dominated by a massive “Recommended” section. This section analyzes your recent activity across your PC and your Microsoft 365 cloud accounts to proactively suggest Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PDFs that it thinks you might want to open.

While Microsoft designed this to boost productivity, it is a glaring privacy nightmare if you share your computer or use it in an office setting, as highly sensitive documents are immediately plastered across the screen the moment you try to browse your files. Fortunately, you can turn off these recommendations and clean up the Home page.

How to Remove the Recommended Section in File Explorer

You can disable file suggestions directly from the File Explorer options menu.

1. Open File Explorer (press Win + E on your keyboard).
2. Click the three-dot menu icon (…) located in the toolbar at the top of the window.
3. Select Options from the drop-down list. This will open the Folder Options dialog box.
4. Ensure you are on the General tab.
5. Look for the Privacy section near the bottom of the window.
6. In this section, uncheck the box labeled Show recommended section (or “Show files from Office.com” in older builds of Windows 11).
7. For maximum privacy, you may also want to uncheck Show recently used files and Show frequently used folders.
8. Click the Apply button, then click OK.

How to Change the Default File Explorer Landing Page

If you don’t like the “Home” page at all—even after cleaning it up—you can force Windows to return to the classic behavior of opening directly to “This PC” (showing your C: drive and network drives).

1. Open the Folder Options dialog box again using the steps above.
2. At the very top of the General tab, look for the dropdown menu labeled Open File Explorer to:.
3. Click the dropdown menu and change it from “Home” to This PC.
4. Click OK.

From now on, whenever you launch File Explorer, you will bypass the messy Home screen entirely and jump straight to your local drives.