WooCommerce – Convert Attributes to Categories or Tags, and Viceversa

Learn with us how to convert WooCommerce product attributes into categories and vice-versa.

Sometimes you create a bunch of products and want to see how the products will look, but you realize that you made a mistake.

You created the products using Color or Size Attributes, but those attributes don’t appear on the site menu. So you needed to use Product Categories instead of Attributes.

Or you made the opposite mistake, you created Color Categories, but now you want to convert the categories into attributes to allow the users to select the color when adding the product to the cart.

Having to edit all the products again manually is painful! But don’t worry.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to Convert WooCommerce Product Attributes into Product Categories or Tags, and vice-versa.

1. Install WP Sheet Editor

WP Sheet Editor is a plugin that allows you to Bulk Edit Products easily.

You can view all the products at once in a spreadsheet, edit the products quickly, and make advanced searches, and a cool feature is that you can update hundreds of products at once using Formulas.

The first step in this tutorial is to install and activate WP Sheet Editor. If you already installed it, you can go to the next step.

2. Set up the spreadsheet

When you install WP Sheet Editor, you’ll see a quick setup page.

This is very easy, you just need to enable the “Products” spreadsheet, then you need to select the fields that you want to edit in the spreadsheet by dragging and dropping them to the left column.

You can follow this tutorial for more information.

3. Open the Sheet Editor Plugin

Once opened, you will see a spreadsheet that contains all your products with all their information.

4. Convert product attributes into categories

If you want to convert WooCommerce product attributes like “blue color” or “medium size” to categories, you can do it this way:

a) Search for the products you want to edit

You can do this by opening the Search tool and then looking for the product keyword, attribute, tag, category, etc.

Once the tool is open, you can easily filter your products by keyword, category, attribute, or tag.

• If you want to filter them by keyword, you need to write the keyword in the “Contains keyword” field.
• To look for all products within a category or containing an attribute or tag, you need to write it in the “Enter Product category…” field. (Like the example below)
• Then just hit the Run search button.

b) Use the “Bulk edit” tool to copy from attribute to category

After the products have been filtered, you will need to open the Bulk edit tool, located in the plugin’s toolbar.

Then, enter the following values:

• Choose the option “Edit all the rows from my current search“
• Select “Product category” as the field you’ll edit.
• Choose “Copy from other columns” as the type of edit you’ll make.
• Write Product size ($pa_size$) in the “Copy from this column field“
• Hit the “Execute now” button.

5. Convert product categories into attributes

This will be exactly the opposite of copying a product’s attribute into a category.

Let’s suppose you have a category called “Large”, and you want to copy it to the product size column. This is what you need to do:

a) Search for the products you want to edit

For this, you will open the Search tool. This tool will help you filter our products by any parameter.

In this case, since we will look for all the products under the “large” category, you need to select the category in the “Enter Product category…” field.

Then hit the Run search button.

b) Convert attributes into categories in bulk

Now that all the products have been filtered, you will use the Bulk edit tool to edit all the search results at once.

Once the tool is open, enter the values as we show you below:

• In this case, we will Edit all the rows from my current search
• Choose “Product Size” as the field you’ll edit. (You can also choose product color or whatever attribute you have).
• Select “Copy from other columns” as the type of edit you’ll make.
• Enter the Product Category ($product_cat$) field in the “Copy from this column field.”
• Hit the “Execute now” button.

6. Copy product tags into categories

If you want to copy product tags to make them categories, it’s really easy. All you need to do is to follow these simple steps.

a) Search for the products you want to edit

To do this step, you will use the Search tool, located in the plugin’s toolbar.

For this example, we will look for all products within a tag.

To do it, you need to select the tag from the “Enter Product category…” field.

Then hit the “Run search” button.

c) Set the necessary values to edit your products in the Bulk edit tool

Now that your products have been filtered, you will open the Bulk edit tool.

After opening the tool, enter these values:

• The rows to be edited will be “All the rows from my current search“
• Select “Product categories” as the field you want to edit.
• Choose “Copy from other columns” in “Type of edit”.
• Enter “Product tags ($product_tag$)” in “Copy from this column”.
• Run the “Execute now” button.

If you want to do the opposite, just change the field you want to edit to “Product tags” and the column from which you’re copying to “$product_cat$ (Product category)”.

Easy, right?

With sheet editor, you won’t have to spend lots of hours again to convert attributes into categories or vice-versa for thousands of WooCommerce products.