Last post we talked about how to get metadata into SharePoint when you are creating new documents. In this post we’ll talk a little about getting metadata into documents that already exist in SharePoint. Often documents are migrated into SharePoint with no metadata. So now we need to figure out how to populate the metadata we need in all of those documents.
As mentioned in our earlier post, the first thing you need to do is to make sure a document library column exists that can hold the metadata. As mentioned, you can create a custom column, either directly in a document library, or as a site column which can be used by all document libraries in the site. You also need to decide if the metadata will be required and if there will be a default value.
If you create the column after you already have documents in a document library, no value will be placed in the column immediately even if you have specified a default value. The metadata values will only be added the next time the document is modified and saved. At this point the user will be prompted for any required columns, and the default value will be placed in columns that have defined defaults.
Another way to add metadata to existing documents is to select the “Edit Properties” selection on the dropdown menu for a document.
This will allow you to directly input the metadata for the document.
This of course would be very slow if you have a large number of documents. You don’t want to have to open each document one at a time. Placing the document library into datasheet view also allows you to edit the metadata columns directly. This is slightly less work than the “Edit Properties” method above, but still pretty slow if you have dozens or hundreds of documents.
The datasheet view can also be used if you have a list of your documents and the corresponding metadata (say in a spreadsheet). The list has to be in the same order as the datasheet view. If this is the case you can copy the metadata values out of your list and paste them into the datasheet view. In this way you can add metadata for dozens or hundreds of documents at the same time. An alternate and potentially faster way to get metadata into existing documents is to use a third party utility that is designed for bulk addition of metadata. For example, Vyapin’s DocKIT for SharePoint can assign metadata stored in a CSV / Excel / TXT file to the respective documents in a document library. A more complete explanation of this product is available in the Microsoft blog post called Updating Metadata on Files in SharePoint: Low Cost, High Reward.
Charlie
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