WordPress – Bulk Edit Advanced Custom Fields in a Spreadsheet

The Advanced Custom Fields plugin is great. It’s simply amazing to have the opportunity of creating advanced custom fields to personalize our posts, user profiles, or any other post types as we want. That eliminates all the limits we can have when managing our site.

However, imagine you have created 10 new custom fields using ACF and want to edit them quickly to update your posts, for example.

We don’t think you have enough time or don’t want to spend some hours making that change.

That’s why we’ll show you how you can quickly and easily edit Advanced Custom Fields in a beautiful spreadsheet. This is really important if you want to save time when editing hundreds of posts containing ACF.

We perfectly know how hard it can be to edit thousands of posts with the normal WordPress editor.

Therefore, we’ll use the Posts, Pages, and Custom Post Types Spreadsheet plugin to bulk edit custom fields in minutes.

Video Guide

Text Guide

Here are the steps you need to follow to bulk edit ACF using WP Sheet Editor.

Step 1. Install the Sheet Editor plugin

The Sheet Editor spreadsheets allow you to edit a lot of custom fields for the following post types:

• Products
• Users
• Pages
• Taxonomies
• Downloads (EDD)
• Posts
• Events
• And any other custom post type and post types generated by other plugins.

Whenever you add a new custom field, you’ll see it as a column on the spreadsheet. Sometimes you’ll have several options to edit your custom fields.

The spreadsheet shows every field according to its type. Here’s the list of custom fields you can edit with WP Sheet Editor:

• Range
• Text
• Text Area
• Button Group
• Checkbox
• Radio Buttons
• Select
• True / False
• File
• Gallery
• Image
• oEmbed
• Wysiwyg Editor
• Color Picker
• Date Picker
• Date Time Picker
• Google Map
• Time Picker
• Accordion
• Flexible Content
• Group
• Tab
• Clone
• Repeater
• Link
• Page Link
• Taxonomy
• User
• Post Object
• Relationship
• Repeater fields
• Etc.

For example, the Content column can be edited using the Gutenberg or the Classic Editor (TinyMCE) editor because you can click on the popup button to open the Block editor, or you can double-click it to open it as an HTML editor:

Step 2. Create the custom fields in ACF

We’ve created a group of fields for authors’ info. It contains the following fields, and we’ve detailed what type of fields they are:

• Author’s Name: Text
• Author’s Bio: Text
• Author’s Photo: Image
• Author’s Birthday: Date Picker
• Author’s Email: Email
• Author’s Website: URL
• Author’s Location: Google Map

Whenever we write a new blog entry, we’ll need to set this information. It can be useful, for example, if we have a publication website and several authors write entries for it. We can promote our authors through info like this.

Step 3. See the custom fields on the spreadsheet

You need to go to wp-admin > WP Sheet Editor > Edit Posts to open the posts spreadsheet. You’ll see all your posts displayed as rows and their complete information displayed as columns.

If you want to find the columns for the custom fields, you need to right scroll or use the Locate Column field to search for the column label. For example, you can search for author’s name and the plugin will take you to the column with that label.

Here we show you how the custom fields will be shown on the spreadsheet.

Each column will be shown according to their field types. For example, the Author’s Photo field gives you the option of uploading the picture from your computer or pasting a URL if you double-click it.

Important

The Google Map field won’t show the maps, but it will show the coordinates as text and numbers.

It creates three columns: one for location, one for latitude, and one for longitude.

Step 4. Edit the values for the custom fields

As you can see, the way in which the plugin shows the custom fields makes it simple for you to edit the values. Here we show you two ways in which you can edit the values for the custom fields you’ve created with ACF.

a) Edit ACF in the spreadsheet

Editing your Advanced Custom Fields in WP Sheet Editor Posts Spreadsheet is as simple as editing an Excel spreadsheet.

The only thing you have to do is to locate the column and then edit it. In this example, we’ve edited the Post pictures and the Post videos columns.

b) Edit ACF in bulk

Another way to edit your ACF in the posts spreadsheet is with the help of the Bulk Edit tool.

Let’s say you’ve created a new custom field with ACF to add videos to your posts and want to start by adding a general video to all your posts. Maybe you want to introduce a new product and promote it in all your posts.

You just need to follow these simple steps.

You can filter your posts to select the ones you want to edit.

For this, just select the I want to search rows to update option in the Select the rows that you want to update dropdown.

Once there, you’ll find these search fields for you to filter your posts:

• Contains Keyword: Enter any specific keyword to search for all posts containing it.
• Status: Draft. Private. Published. Etc.
• Author: Enter any author’s name to search for all of his posts.
• Categories, Tags, Formats: Enter any of those three search parameters.

Once you decide how you’ll filter your posts, click on Run search, and it will filter your posts and take you back to the Bulk Edit fields.

Now you need to select these values to edit your custom fields. For example, you can edit your Post Videos using these values.

• Select the rows that you want to update: I want to select rows to update
• What field do you want to edit: Post Videos
• Select the type of edit: Set value
• Replace existing value with this value: Enter post video URL.
• Click on Execute now.

Done!

As you can see, with the Posts, Pages, and Custom Post Types Spreadsheet plugin, it’s really simple to edit ACF for posts.

It’s the perfect integration for the ACF plugin. You just need to install it, open it, and then start editing your custom fields.