Datablist comes with a Bulk Edit tool. Currently available actions are:

Bulk Edit Process

Step 1 - Items to edit

The bulk edit feature works by selecting the items to edit in this order:

  • If you have selected items in your collection, it will bulk edit them
  • If you have a filter or a full-text search term, it will bulk edit the filtered items
  • Otherwise, it will bulk edit all your collection items

Click on "Bulk Edit" in the "Edit" menu:

Bulk Edit
Bulk Edit

Step 2 - Select a property to edit

All your collection properties are displayed in the Bulk Edit drawer.

Step 3 - Select action and options

The actions list depends on the property data type. Some are available for all data types. Others are restricted to Text properties.

Bulk Edit Actions
Bulk Edit Actions

Step 4 - Preview and run

Before editing your items, a preview step is shown. If the preview suits you, click "Edit all" to run the editing process on your items.

If you change a setting (the bulk edit action or its options), the preview step is reinitialized. And another preview will be shown again before editing your data.

Bulk Edit Actions
Bulk Edit Actions

Edit current value

Replace the current value with a new value.

For a text property, use it to set a text for a property to all your items. For a number property, use it to change the number value to all your items.

Truncate

The truncate action is available for text properties. It has 3 options:

  • Max length - The max length allowed. If a text is longer, it will be truncated
  • Don't cut on word - When checked, will truncate on the first space before the defined length. It means the truncated results length will always be shorter or equal to the original text.
  • Add Ellipsis - If checked, will add '...' at the end when the text is shortened. The result string will be at max 3 characters longer than Max length. **If the text is not shortened, an ellipsis won't be added.

Add a Prefix or a Suffix

This action is available for text properties. It is self-explanatory: it adds a prefix or a suffix to your text.

Notes: It doesn't add a space. If needed, add a space after the prefix text or before the suffix text.

Remove symbols

This action is available for text properties. It remove non-letter and non-digit characters from your data.

An option to keep punctionation is available ('-', '.', ',', ':', '!', '?', '@', etc.).

Examples with removing punctuation option:

France (2022) => France 2022
John 🚀! => John
contact@gmail.com 🙏 => contactgmailcom

Examples with keeping punctuation option

France (2022) => France (2022)
John 🚀! => John !
contact@gmail.com 🙏 => contact@gmail.com

Remove Extra Spaces

The "Remove Extra Spaces" tool can remove all spaces in a text, or just "extra spaces".

option to remove all spaces
option to remove all spaces

Use the "Remove all spaces" option to normalize phone numbers, etc. For example: +33 7 78 23 93 23 would be edited to +33778239323.

When the "Remove all spaces" is disabled, the tool cleans your texts with the following steps:

  • Remove leading and trailing spaces
  • Remove extra spaces between words (keep a single space). A space can be a Tab, a space, a non-breaking space (nbsp), and any other character that represents a space.
  • Remove extra new line (keep a single newline character)

Change Text Case

For text properties. 3 modes are available:

  • Uppercase - All letters will be converted to their uppercase version. Ex: john => JOHN
  • Lowercase - All letters will be converted to their lowercase version. Ex: API => api
  • Capitalize - The first letter of all words will be capitalized. Ex: john is a good man => John Is A Good Man
  • Capitalize only the first word - Only the first letter of the first word will be capitalized. Ex: john is a good man => John is a good man
  • Reverse case - Converts the uppercase caracters to lowercase and lowercase characters to uppercase. Ex: John -> jOHN

Convert HTML into Plain Text

Convert HTML to text while keeping some structure. This action removes HTML tags and concatenates the text to generate readable text.

  • Bullet lists are converted to text lists with -
  • New lines are kept

And the action cleans the results to remove any extra spaces.

Clear the property

Will clear values for all current items for the selected property.

If your items are:

First Name   |    Last  Name     |    Job Title
John         |     Doe           |       CEO
Frank        |     Sinatra       |      Singer

Clearing on the property Last Name will give you:

First Name   |    Last  Name     |    Job Title
John         |                   |       CEO
Frank        |                   |      Singer