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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?

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  • The 15 lines just affects the size of the input area on the form, it doesn't actually limit how much you can enter. That is defined at the field type level.
    – Eric Alexander
    Jul 26, 2012 at 13:52
  • @PirateEric That's what I thought...but I didn't see anyplace to clear any limits. I did see the "allow unlimited is Document Libraries" radio button. That suggests to me that there may be some character limit by default...but I can't imagine it being less than 1200 bytes.
    – dwwilson66
    Jul 26, 2012 at 14:21
  • Have you checked whether The list is set up to require content approval? If yes, then you may face the above issue.
    – neo269
    Jul 26, 2012 at 17:34
  • @saumilm : Require content approval is set to "no".
    – dwwilson66
    Jul 26, 2012 at 19:05
  • 3
    You are 100% sure none of your Columns are Rich text or Enhanced rich text?
    – Anders Aune
    Jul 27, 2012 at 0:05

13 Answers 13

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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

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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"

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  • 1
    This actually makes sense in a Microsoft-y sort of way. Checking out a document will lock metadata fields, do if you try to edit them in datasheet view, the come us as read only. Once checkout is NOT required, the fields no longer need to be held as read-only. Granted, there may be instances where there's update contentions...but I'd rather have the bulk update take precedence over individual user settings anyway. Thanks!
    – dwwilson66
    Apr 16, 2013 at 15:25
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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.

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  • When updating via Access I change to rich text, update, then change back to enhanced rich text.
    – John Faughnan
    Jun 8, 2018 at 14:43
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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

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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 :)

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  • Yes! Changing the Multiple Lines of Text to "Plain Text" worked for me without any other changes! Thanks!!
    – Cher Reynolds
    Jul 16, 2014 at 12:43
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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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)

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I had the same problem.

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

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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.

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