Tag Documents Automatically in SharePoint

Greg Zelfond, the SharePoint Maven, discusses how to tag documents automatically in SharePoint here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq5zibnXkhY . See Greg's excellent blog for all you need to know about SharePoint.

Here's a summary of the process:

You can use SharePoint to automatically add a metadata field with a tag for documents that are copied to a particular location in a folder directory.

1. So in this example, we have a few folders set up in a SharePoint online account to organize documents of various types in:

2. Click on 'Add column' to create a new metadata field to track the document types. Enter choices for each of the directories in the folder hierarchy.

3. Next map the folder names to the values entered in the metadata for the new field. Go to the cogwheel button in the upper right to access the settings, and select 'Library settings'.

4. Under Library settings, click on 'column default value settings'. The folder hierarchy will be shown to the left. Click on a folder name, and then click on the name of the metadata field you created. A dialog box will appear in which you should enter the default value for that field in that folder. Be sure to type in the exact value.

5. Afterwards when files are dragged into a SharePoint folder, the metadata field will populate automatically.

One of the advantages of bulking processing the metadata in this fashion is that the value in the metadata field will not change when the files are moved to new locations in SharePoint.