Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Editing Infopath form items in DataSheet view

Now that we have collected mountains of data via my online Form, we need to edit some data fields. (Those who completed the forms cannot spell well, so we want to clean up some plain text fields.) Found that this cannot be done in DataSheet View in Sharepoint. The Data Sheet View is always opened as Read-Only. Found the explanation as to why this is here.
"There are three types of views available. A Standard View shows a list of your forms. A Datasheet View looks like a spreadsheet. With normal lists, you can edit the items directly in the Datasheet View, but data promoted from InfoPath forms cannot be pushed back into the forms by SharePoint, so the fields will be marked read-only. A Calendar View displays a calendar control with the forms displayed at a particular date or range of dates. You can use promoted values (such as the Start Date in the Meeting Agenda) as the date used to display the form." (My emphasis added.)

So... rather than easily edit all incorrect data from a single page, we have to manually open edit and save each Form.