Why are fields in Datasheet View read only?

Question

I have four metadata columns into which I cannot paste data for a bulk upload. A diaglog box: "The selected cells are read only" appears when I try to paste.

The cells are defined as "multiple lines of text" with up to 15 lines.

The largest thing I'm attempting to paste is 200 words, 1140 bytes. The average byte count is around 825 bytes.

I am able to paste, edit, delete and copy from all the other cells in the table, so I'm pretty confident that my Datasheet View & permissions are set up appropriately.

Three of the columns are inherited from my parent site and were created last week, one is defined on the site with which I'm working and was created this morning. I don't think that the logical location of the fields is making a difference.

The only consistency between the three is that they're all long-form text fields.

In doing my research, I discovered this question on stack which states that "It will come up saying "The selected cells are read only" if you have a multiple lines of text field that is anything other than "Plain Text" (Such as the body section of a blog post), as Datasheet view has no idea how to deal with HTML etc." I'm importing from a semi-colon delimited text file, and viewing it in a hex editor doe not reveal any hidden control characters.

I've checked my datasheet, site and column properties, and cannot see anything that would force these fields into a read-only status.

Anyone ever run into this before? Anyone know of some other things to check?

Answer 1

From my experience, this is not possible through the SharePoint Dataview Sheet View. This is a new feature in 2010 and although super delicious and powerful, it still has a lot of issues that need to be resolved before it will be as powerful as it can be - in 2013, Microsoft has made improvements as per this article from MSDN

To answer your question - in no state are metadata columns editable in datasheet view. One of our clients had the same issue and they ended up going with ShareGate's migration tools. They have a metadata editing tool that runs for about $395

There is also a free tool on CodePlex (which I have not tried) that could be worth a try - from the comments, a lot of people found it helpful: WinForm SharePoint list item editing tool

Answer 2

I stumbled across a way to fix this today.

Under "Versioning Settings" there is a setting called "Require documents to be checked out before they can be edited"

By default, in all my libraries, I have this set to "Yes"

I discovered if I change that to "No" my datasheet views become read/write.

Odd? Very. But it does seem to work.

Incidentially, I flip that to "No" only when I'm going to be making mutliple changes to a document property in datasheet view. Once I'm done, I flip it back to "Yes"

Answer 3

I changed the text type from 'Enhanced Rich Text' to 'Rich text' in the column setting(through List setting) from SharePoint and it worked for me.

Answer 4

I had the same issue. There is another way to solve this problem with editing Multiple lines of text field in DataSheet(Access) view:

Changing Versioning Settings for lists and libraries is useless. You should change field settings in SharePoint Designer.

Open site- choose list, then right click on Multiple Line Field (with editing problem) and choose Column Settings.

In the Column Settings uncheck "Enhanced rich text (Rich text with pictures, tables, and hyperlinks)". Do not forget to save changes.

This will solve the problem

Answer 5

If you have Multiple lines of text columns with Rich text or Enhanced rich text, you can't edit the columns with datasheet view with office 2010 (haven't tested other offices). Tbh I haven't looked much into the reasons, only learned to live with it :)

Answer 6

I had the same issue. So I followed one of the previous posters advice and changed the Versioning Settings for libraries to "No". After the change, I still couldn't copy the data.

I went back to the Multiple lines of text field that was causing the issue, and changed the "Specify the type of text to allow" to "Plain text". I was then able to do a bulk update in in Datasheet View.

I'm not sure if the combination of changing the library setting and the text type setting worked, but the issue was resolved.

Answer 7

If your input form is InfoPath you will also not be able to edit data with datasheet view. All those other setting about content approval and checkout won't matter.

Answer 8

Check if the list is set up to require content approval, and you are viewing the list in the All Items view.

Answer 9

I had the same problem. The solution was that the table I wanted to add had more colomns than the list. The selection required data to be pasted in the 'Modified by' field, which is read-only.

Answer 10

Have just spent a few hours going through the suggestions on the post. Finally managed to resolve the read only issue by identifying the columns that were causing the problem and removing from my dataset. Only way I found to do this was copying one field at a time of one record working across the way. It turned out any fields that are set by the system are read only: Created by. Modified, modified by, ID etc. Once I removed these columns from my excel dataset and matched it with the datasheet on Sharepoint it pasted the data fine. Hope this of help to someone having similar issues as the error code does not help pinpoint the issue and couldn't see any way to identify read only fields.

Answer 11

The answer is that you can not use multitext field with "Enhanced rich text (Rich text with pictures, tables, and hyperlinks" you have to select either the option of Plain Text or Rich text (Bold, italics, text alignment, hyperlinks)

Answer 12

I had the same problem.

Just don't paste the "ID" field as it is automatically generated.

Answer 13

I recently encountered this issue and what resolved it (after checking the usual remedies mentioned in some of the other answers) is removing the "Edit" column from the view. (The Edit column being the one that gives you the icon shortcut to Edit Properties.)

Datasheet became editable once I did that.