Tagging in SharePoint: Managed Metadata vs. Choice Columns | Nested Choices

I had no idea that "Managed Metadata" was even a thing in SP! wow!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Awesome job on the delivery. Love the style and energy. Superb job. I look forward to reaching this standard with my video presence. Ps looking forward to our Power Platform collab 😎

Great video, thank you very much

Thanks for the short summary. Can the data displayed be structured differently, i.e not using : as the separator? Are there any drawbacks with filtering, grouping by, and is it possible to apply styling to the options similar to a choice pill?

This is incredibly helpful!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you so much, I've been looking for something similar for weeks. 🙌🏽

This is amazing !

Thank you! I have been using Managed Metadata in our SP libraries & lists for years and never realized that users can create terms from the library/list without going first to Term Store. I’ve been reluctant to open the Term Store to less disciplined users. This may be the ticket!

What a ridiculously and typically Microsoft unintuitive and complicated way to do such a barebones yet crucial thing.
Between this, Teams, Lists, Loop, Planner For Loop In Teams, Teams For Planner in Project In Teams In Loop - MS is making organisational teamwork and secure file management an absolute joke. I wonder in the future how many times confidential information will be publicly available due to the new Microsoft Minefield way of working.

And it IS possible to migrate a site column from a specific site collection to the Content type gallery. It will require a short PowerShell script, but it is better than not being able to use the site column on multiple site collections 😂

You're a natural teacher, high quality lessons learned here, thank you!

Also terms are multi-language so you can for a given term value add the correspondent translated value for the same term in other languages :)

How does this work if ure using power apps as the way to add data and not the sp form

Thanks for sharing this, it really opened my eyes to better data collection. How about a video on using meta data on views/reporting? Grouping in views and how SP meta data can be used in Power Bi.

Just be carefull as there is a 20 items limitation when you try to use managed metadata in a Powerapps forms.
Too bad...

any way to get in contact with you ?

What if you'd like to separate Brand and Model with managed metadata? Or must they be chosen together at a go?

Great video, thanks. But a quick question: in your example how would you ensure users picked the child term rather than simply picking "Apple", "Samsung", etc?

REALLY easy to follow thank you...But when I went through the steps and clicked 'ok'.... I click NEW and no options for a new column pops up like it does in your video...why is this! ???

Great video, thank you. I've been grappling with the design of content management in SP to support a complex, but relatively small, department. I think I'll try to blend in some managed metadata to go with my usual list & lookup columns combo.

SP is famously tricksy when it comes to keeping limitations in mind for any given feature. Do you have any rules of thumb to help prevent frustrations down the road? e.g. MM columns can't be the source for a lookup column, and can't readily be added to a calculated column formula.

How do you add the column to the list ?

I love this!

as a site collection admin and part of the sharepoint "owner" group of a particular site. I don't have the option to create more than one site level term group. The "new group" option isn't there. I am able to add term sets and terms and even rename the term group. Is there some other permission thing I'm not considering?

How would you create a group by brand view when using managed Metadata in the way you used it?

I'm struggling with my managed metadata in a document library. The metadata is stored against the file, so if we send the file out to a developer (IT won't give access to third parties) when the file comes back the managed metadata is broken and overwrites the existing data against the document with blanks. If anyone has any tips on this I'd appreciate hearing them because we might have to default over to Choice columns to take the burden of re-adding metadata off my team 😔

Loved it. One question
While adding data I clicked on Return to Classic. How can I get back to the normal previous view. Anyway I can disable it

Thank you! I've been trying to figure out what managed metadata list were for years! Great simple explanation.

Buy if you want to surface a managed metadata column in a canvas app, then there doesn't seem to be any control for that.

Wait this just help me to help another Fortune 500 😂

I'm trying to apply this to my site pages.. but I can't seem to get it to work..

What about Power Apps?

A big problem with this is that there is now no simple way to filter your list by brand. For example, the way you have done it, there is no simple way to filter the list to show only the users who bought an Apple product. To filter the list to show only the users who bought an Apple product, you would need to add each individual Apple product to your filter. Getting around this problem would require that you add two tags for each item---both the lower-level tag and the higher-level tag. For example, as well as the 'Apple:iPhone' tag, you would also need to add the 'Apple' tag. But this really clutters up the options when you go to filter and also reintroduces the very problem you were trying to solve (because someone could add both the 'Apple:iPhone' tag and the 'Samsung' tag to a single row).

I have list of 410 and need to do them in groups, is there a way to do it in bulk? coz if I do it one by one it'll take ages.

I'm here trying to still understand the benefit to Metadata. Maybe I have not heard of actual scenarios where this makes sense to me. I'm sure there are scenarios where they do and maybe I'll run into them as more experience comes my way. but the examples I've seen in video tutorials so far don't really make sense to me. I get so much more done, and faster, with simple validation. for example, in your first scenario, isn't it faster, easier, and more effective to enter a simple validation on the "phone model" columns to only show the relevant ones depending on the selection of the phones brand? (2 seperate sub menus and only show the relevant one). If im working on a big app that will be using complicated and long formulas many times (the same ones), then it makes sense to use something like classes, but I don't see how all these steps can save time when a validation takes 10 seconds. On your # 2, a simple "other" option with an extra "text" field and same validation as before will allow for user to enter other inputs not listed. I understand you still have to click 2 buttons into the choice column settings and add the new users "other" input into the choices yourself, but the metadata approach is no different; you definitely don't want users to have the freedom of adding choices that everyone else to see (as we all know what this will lead too... more work), so having approvers is the best practices choice here, making the process the same at that point.

Do you know how to insert more details about who edited a Word document in a SharePoint library? Specifically, since the system sees the name and surname, how do I get the field containing the email and phone number of that person. I need to physically insert them in the document and I would like to automate this so that the person editing the document does not have to do it manually.

I have been ranting for years about why Microsoft is making it SO easy for people to set Lists and Libraries up in a way that will hurt them later on. I have to agree, "Add column" should be avoided in 90% of the cases.😢

This video was really informative! I learned a lot, especially that users can create term in managed metadata. I do have one question, though, your video showed correlated values with a colon (e.g. Apple: iPhone 11), but mine only shows the second value. Any idea why that might be? Thanks

wooooow that's amazing!!!!

How easy are these metadata managed fields to work with in PowerBI?

Also, am I correct in thinking that related columns have to be 1:1, meaning if I select Apple at the top tier, on the second tier can I have exclusively Apple models, IPhone 14, 14 pro, SE etc or is limited to 'iPhone'. Basically looking for cascading filtered drop down selections without powerApps integration.

Thanks for the video, but i think you need to mention that one advantage of using choices over managed metadata is that choices can be edited when opening the document using word desktop app (from View >> SharePoint Propeties), while managed metadata will be shown inside the property section but the value entered will not be saved to SharePoint which can lead to confusing results.. did you ever need this ? and did you find a solution for it?

Thanks for the info. A caveat I would like to add is that the resulting selection from this column type cannot be used in a calculated column. This could be a drawback if you need to add a power automate flow to implement a simple if-clause and turns the whole thing as an overkill. In such cases, probably a choice column is better.

The downside to Managed Metadata is that it's hard to read with no spacing between the ":" delimiter (that's a big complaint with our business users). So, you need to add spacing with a generic character when entering the metadata in the Term Store (leading and trailing spaces get trimmed). A nice compromise is to just use a lookup list/column to manage the hierarchy. It ends up looking nicer while helping to shore up data entry faux pas. In addition, it's pretty easy for the admin to manage.

How do those react to search? Can we filter them with PNP?