Bulk Edit PODS Custom Fields in WooCommerce Products

Let’s see how to bulk edit PODS custom fields in WooCommerce products!

Managing a WooCommerce store with many products can be overwhelming, especially if you’re using custom fields to store extra product information like specifications, instructions, or custom options. If you’re using the PODS plugin to extend products with custom fields, editing these custom fields one by one can take hours. Luckily, there’s a faster way.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to bulk edit PODS custom fields in WooCommerce products using WP Sheet Editor, a powerful plugin that shows your products in a spreadsheet inside your WordPress dashboard. You’ll be able to make changes to hundreds of products in minutes.

What is PODS?

PODS is a WordPress plugin that helps you create and manage custom fields and custom content types. With PODS, you can add extra fields to your WooCommerce products (like text, dates, dropdowns, or even relationships with other content). It’s great for store owners who need more flexibility than what WooCommerce offers by default.

We assume you already installed PODS on your site and have created some custom fields.

Install WP Sheet Editor

WP Sheet Editor is a WordPress plugin that lets you edit your WooCommerce products in a spreadsheet. You can manage product data in the spreadsheet, bulk edit data with a few clicks, search for products using any field as a search filter, as well as export and import products.

Besides the WP Sheet Editor plugin, you need to install the free WP Sheet Editor – PODS extension, which adds compatibility between PODS and WP Sheet Editor so that you can manage custom fields easily.

After installing the plugin and the extension, you can follow the steps in the sections below in order to bulk manage PODS custom fields in WooCommerce products.

Open the products spreadsheet

To view and manage your WooCommerce products in a spreadsheet, go to WP Sheet Editor > Edit products in the WordPress admin dashboard. You’ll see all your products displayed in the spreadsheet as rows, and all product fields as columns.

Display PODS custom fields in the spreadsheet

To make sure that all custom fields added with PODS appear in the spreadsheet, you need to refresh the database.

To do this, click Settings > Scan DB to find fields.

Locate PODS custom fields in the spreadsheet

To view and edit custom fields in the spreadsheet, you have at least two options.

First, you can use the Locate column field to type the name of the column/custom field you want to search for.

You’ll notice that just by starting to type the name, you’ll see suggestions of the fields that you may be looking for.

If you select a specific field from the suggestions, you’ll go directly to that column in the spreadsheet.

Another way to easily locate custom fields created with PODS is to create your own workspace by hiding unnecessary columns.

For this, you need to open the Columns manager.

Once you’re in the column manager, disable all unnecessary columns by moving them from Enabled to Disabled. As you can see below, we have hidden all other columns and keep only the columns we added with the PODS plugin.

You can save this configuration of columns for future sessions:

• Tick the Save these settings for future sessions checkbox.
• Type the name of this configuration of columns in Add a name for this group of columns.
• Click on Apply settings.

Now we have created our custom workspace to manage PODS custom fields only in the spreadsheet. This simplifies our work completely.

Edit PODS custom fields in the spreadsheet

You can edit custom fields added with the PODS plugin in the spreadsheet. This is great because you don’t have to open and edit products individually in order to bulk update custom fields data.

You just need to go to the field/column you want to edit in your WooCommerce products, make all the changes you want, and click on Save to apply the changes.

Bulk editing custom fields from PODS in the spreadsheet is a great way to simplify your workflow and save a lot of time.

You can edit fields according to their field types:

• Checkbox
• Text editors
• Relationships
• Numbers
• Etc.

Search for products based on PODS custom fields

You can search for WooCommerce products based on PODS custom fields. This is great because you can find specific groups of products that share similar data in specific PODS fields.

For example, you can search for all products that have a specific related product in a relationship PODS field. You can also search for posts that have the same expiry date. Or you can search for products that have the same support email.

To use PODS custom fields as search filters, you have two options:

a) Quick search

You can use the quick search by hovering the mouse cursor over the Search tool.

That will display the quick search tool. In Search by specific field you can select the field, the operator, and the value.

For example, let’s search for products with Support email = [email protected].

Once you have selected the values, click on Search.

Below, we have searched for all the products containing a specific support email address. You can view all the products matching the search criteria displayed in the spreadsheet, as well as the active search filter above the spreadsheet.

b) Advanced search

You can use the Search tool to filter WooCommerce products using PODS fields as search filters. This tool allows you to find products by keyword, category, attribute, tag, shipping class, visibility, etc. It also allows you to use multiple fields to run combined searches.

Open the Search tool.

Tick the Enable advanced filters and add the PODS custom fields as search filters.

In this example, we will search for products with these values:

• Support email = [email protected]
• Expiry Date = 2025-06-30
• Product video = Empty

Once you have selected the search terms, click on Run search.

After running the search, the spreadsheet will display all the products that match the search terms. You can view all the active search filters above the spreadsheet.

Bulk edit PODS custom fields in WooCommerce products

You can bulk update PODS custom fields with a few clicks. This is a great way to edit any custom field in hundreds or thousands of products. You need to open the Bulk Edit tool.

Now you need to select the values to bulk update a specific PODS custom field:

• Select the rows that you want to update: You have these options:
  • Edit all rows
  • Edit all rows from the current search
  • Edit all the manually selected rows
  • Open the search tool from here and filter rows
• What field do you want to edit: Here you need to select the custom field you want to bulk edit. All PODS custom fields are compatible with the Bulk Edit tool.
• Select type of edit: You have multiple options:
  • Set value – Use this to replace all existing values with a new value.
  • Replace – Use this to replace specific values with a new value.
  • Clear value – Use this to remove the existing value and leave the field empty.
  • Append – Use this to append (add after) a value to the existing values.
  • Prepend – Use this to prepend (add before) a value to the existing values.
  • Copy from other columns – Use this to copy the values of other fields into this field.
  • Custom formula
  • PHP Function
• Values: Depending on the type of edit you have selected in the previous field, you will see the necessary fields to set a new value, replace values, etc.
• Once you have configured your bulk update, click on Execute Now to apply the changes in bulk.

In this example, we will bulk update the values in the User guide link field.

As you can see, we have updated the User guide link field, which we added with the PODS plugin to our WooCommerce products.

This is how you can bulk edit PODS custom fields in WooCommerce products. You can save a lot of time by bulk editing in the spreadsheet. Forget about managing your WooCommerce products in the normal WooCommerce editor.