Applying Metadata to Documents

Welcome to Spot on SharePoint, Metadata and You. Module 4, applying metadata to documents. Now that we have a good understanding of what metadata is, how do we apply it to our documents day to day? For a single document, you’ll use the details pane to access all your metadata fields. Adding information in these fields saves them in real time.

You can also choose edit all to see a larger format of the fields. For multiple documents, you can use the Details pane to bulk edit. This allows you to apply the same metadata to multiple documents. Or you can use the Quick Edit view. This provides an Excel like experience where you can apply different metadata to all of the documents in your view.

Let’s take a look at an example. In our first example, we’ll upload a single document using the upload feature in the menu ribbon. By selecting files, it opens a windows explorer and I can choose a document to upload. The system shows me that it’s uploading in the far right hand corner, and once it’s uploaded, it’s in unassigned because I have not tagged my department yet. If I select the document and open the details pane, I can see the properties associated with the document and I can update.

By choosing the department, it saves in real time and automatically reassigns that document into Finance. I can also select the document and select edit all under properties to get a wider format for entering the rest of my metadata. I can make my choices in the drop down selection or type some information in my free text field in this case called reference When I select save, you’ll see that all of my changes are automatically applied to the document Now let’s take a look at bulk editing multiple uploads. In this case, I’m going to drag and drop several files into the library in order to upload them all at once. Once again, they’re listed as unassigned but I’m going to select several, in this case 4 items, and we’re going to tag them all together.

By opening the details pane with multiple documents selected, you can update the metadata for all the documents. Keep in mind any update you do applies universally to all selected items, so make sure you’re only updating fields that have the same information. When you hit save, all your changes take effect and are reflected in the documents. In this case, they’ve all been moved to Operations and my sample tagging has been applied. Now let’s take a look at the quick edit feature.

Quick edit is particularly useful when you have multiple documents to tag, but they don’t all have the same information. I like to filter a column to empty so that I know that I’m only looking at the newly uploaded content that needs to be tagged in my quick edit view. Keep in mind, you must be in an ungrouped view to see the quick edit feature. It presents in an excel like grid format that allows you to tab through your columns and apply information. Similar to Excel, it also allows you to pull down or autofill columns where the information is the same, allowing you to quickly identify the different information that you want to apply to your documents.

You can continue working through the list of documents, applying different information where appropriate, or the same information where that’s appropriate. Leveraging the autofill features allows you to quickly navigate through this. You can always tab away and return to a column to add more information if you’ve missed something. The quick edit view saves your updates as you go and you can see that by the spinning wheel on the right hand side. When you exit quick edit, all of your content will now be tagged with the specific information that you applied.

Thank you for watching our video. We hope this has helped you understand how metadata can be applied to your documents. If you have any questions, please contact us using the information below. We’d love to hear from you.