"Required Properties" error opening SharePoint online DOCX with more than 50 term set items

Steel Contributor

Summary

For a month or two my document editors have been opening word documents from a SharePoint library and getting "required properties" error preventing them from saving the file.

 

After much testing we've found the cause is setting a managed meta data column to have more than 50 term set items as the default column values.

 

I found this very hard to find any information about so I wanted to post here so that there is something for others to find, and to gauge how much of an issue this is.

Ideally I'd love it if the Word/SharePoint/OneDrive teams updated the message displayed in word to let people know that the issue isn't missing required metadata but the number of metadata items in one property.

If you want my test methodology and results let me know and I'll post it below.

 

Environment:

  • SharePoint online document library, custom content type, with a location column, with 62 possible managed meta data term set items available.
  • The default content type for the library is the custom content type.
  • The SharePoint online document library Location column has default values set, which equal all the items in the termset. So each document put into the library gets all 62 terms added to it’s location property.
  • Windows 2010 laptop, running Word 2016 desktop app.
  • User editing the word document is a “member” of the site so has edit rights to the sharepoint online document library.

The use case

  • A user uploads a document
  • It receives the default custom content type
  • Because of the custom content type it gets the Location property
  • Because the default values for the location property are set to all 62 location items the document’s location property gets 62 term set items added to it.
  • When the user opens the document in word online they can edit the content of the document and it saves with no problems
  • When the user opens the document in the Word Desktop App (Word 2016 in this case), they get the “Required properties. To save to the server correct the invalid or missing required properties” message.
    • After much testing I have proved (to myself at least) that this message is NOT correct. Word, OneDrive and SharePoint teams take note.
    • This message also occurs when a Managed Meta data property contains more than 50 items , when the user opens the file. Note I say when the user opens the file. If the property contains 40 items and the user opens the document in Word 2016 they can add 20 more items and save. But when they open it again they get the error.

The solution

- For me this is going to be tricky, but I have to find a way of allowing for all usecases around location specific documentation while not giving every document all 62 of our location terms.

- Your suggestions welcome :)

4 Replies

This issue also occurred in our environment. We are unable to save document, in Word app, which has more than 50 terms, error message "required properties" is appeared.

 

Has someone solved the issue, or know the root cause?

 

We have also raised MS premium support ticket.

Hi @cebud 

We didn't find any solution for this from MS, or in our extensive searching and discussions with other experts in the field.

 

So we changed the way we did our meta data, rather than adding all site locations individually to each document, we created an "All sites" metadata item and use that, only changing it where required.

In our case if a document didn't relate to all sites it only related to 1, 2 or up to 5 so the 50 limit wasn't an issue.

 

 

I am having a similar issue, but we are not using managed metadata, but using Custom Content Types with site columns. I've even removed the troubled fields from the content type and it is still showing in the document properties and saying they are required.