In my previous blog about the Content and Structure page in MOSS 2007, I talked about how to move or copy documents from one doc library to another while maintaining the metadata and version history of the documents.
As promised, I’ve had a further look at the Content and Structure page to see what else can be done. One very handy thing you can do is enable check-in / out of a selected number of documents at once. I wanted to do this in order to update metadata for a number of documents using the “Edit in Datasheet mode”. This is a really quick way of updating metadata of multiple documents at once. So here’s what I do:
1. Access the Content and Structure page for the doc library your in (see previous blog for how to get there)
2. Select the docs you want to update and go to Actions > Check-Out
3. Go to your doc library and got to Actions > Edit in Datasheet. This opens a datasheet view and you can complete/update your metadata directly here across all the documents that you need to update. Note that it will show all the documents in the library i.e. those that are checked-out and those that are not. This means that if you update the metadata for a document that is not checked out, when you come out of the Datasheet view you will get a message saying that you can’t update that document.
4. Now you’ll need to check those document back in so go back to the Content and Structure page and choose View > Checked out to me.
5. Finally go to Actions > Check In
There you go! You can now update metadata for multiple documents at once. This comes in really handy if you want to upload multiple documents and associate metadata with them.
