Forum Discussion
How to edit Meta-Data easily?
Hello everyone,
I work with various document libraries in Sharepoint Online and use a lot of metadata there.
Maintaining this metadata efficiently, quickly and easily is a very laborious undertaking that I would like to optimize.
What would help me would be:
1) to have a large preview window in the table view for the selected document, which shows a complete A4 page.
2) can you also insert a preview window in the grid view?
3) to be able to individually design the detail area on the right. Fields can be shown and hidden in the form and the order can be sorted. But the basic layout is rigid. For example, it would be helpful to display the metadata label (column name) and value side by side instead of one below the other. This means you can get more information on the screen without scrolling, especially if you have a wide monitor.
4) in the details area, when you change from one field to the next, it is saved immediately. As a result, there is always a short delay and no progress is made quickly. It would be much better if you could change several metadata of a document and the data would only be saved when the document was changed.
5) I work a lot with filtered views. Can you display the details area and the filter area (with the filter checkboxes) at the same time?
Does anyone have any best practices or can show you how to set up simple metadata maintenance with many metadata columns and files and keep it up to date?!
Maybe these are partly newbie questions, but I haven't found a satisfactory solution yet.
Thanks for your support!
Cliff
Support for metadata in SharePoint is limited via the web. The OneDrive for Business client also does not support metadata. There are also no major changes planned for (see roadmap).
Other characteristics to be aware off are:
a. changing metadata via the standard SharePoint web page indeed saves directly after changing a field. However, each changed value results in a document version that will consume your storage quota. This becomes particularly painful when dealing with large media files.
Note: simply renaming a file also results in a new document version
b. uploading files (using the Modern View) when there are required fields does not force users to enter values. They are informed but can choose to not fill out the values.
c. it is not possible to extract metadata from the files during uploading (e.g. keywords from pdf files, sent date from emails, GPS location from photos, ...)
d. downloading files plus the files' metadata is not possible.The Collab365 web site lists several document management tools for SharePoint (link).
The explorer one may be of interest to you. It shows the metadata as a wide pane (link). Commonly used column types (date, lookup, ...) are supported and there is also support for columns of type "Location". It does not save the metadata after each individual change so there is no delay. One does have to click "save" to save the changed fields in a single request and this does not result in a new version. The user is forced to set values for required fields during uploading and extracting metadata from the files during uploading is possible. It is also possible to download files from SharePoint plus the files' metadata.
