I’ve poked around through the program and the help and didn’t find this, but just in case I missed it–is there a way to select a group of documents and set a given custom meta-data field for all of them at once?
Barring that, is there a way to quickly tab through the rows in a specific column in the outliner (for a snappy repeated paste) without closing all the other columns?
Not a huge deal, but I didn’t want to miss a good trick if it’s there!
You can select multiple non-contiguous documents with Command-click, of course. If you can set the meta-data in question through a right click, as in giving them all the same label, then yes … but I’ve never used custom meta-data beyond that, so …
Mark
Thanks. I know how to select the different documents, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to change the custom meta-data via the contextual menu the way you can label and status. The way I’m doing it presently is creating a collection based on other search terms that fortunately are sufficient to pull up the majority of documents that need the same custom meta-data, and then using the Outliner with only that one column showing to quickly tab through and paste the appropriate text in. The actual tab and paste is fast; it takes longer to set up the Outliner with just that one field and then put all the others back again in the appropriate order. 
After that, there are just a few other documents straggling around that I have to hunt down and affix the meta-data to, since they didn’t come up via the initial search.
So. Not bad, but I just wanted to check that I wasn’t missing an easier way.
No, there’s no way of doing this - it wouldn’t really make sense given that all custom meta-data columns are free text. Something to think about for 2.5 or 3.0, maybe.
Okey-doke. That was pretty much what I figured, and the reasoning makes sense. And the method of just clearing away all the other columns in the Outliner worked quite well, since I was able to gather the group via other criteria. Just wanted to know for sure!
And thanks again for the custom meta-data columns. Super, super useful. What a treat! 
I’ve been using the Outliner to do this, like you, mm. I don’t reduce the number of columns, though. I just go down the items, copying and pasting in the data in the custom meta-data column. In my case it’s the day of week and date of the scene (essential in crime novels!) so that I can see that the chronology is working and I haven’t sent them all off to the office on a Sunday. (It’s like setting the video recorder for the evening’s TV without getting the odd half-hour overlap.)
Trouble is that I had 50 or so scenes already written and after working out the date and day of about twenty of them I got bored. . . Deadline’s next Monday, so I’d better get on with writing a few more words this afternoon and hope I notice the major errors on the read-through.
cw