Bulk modify work items

You can use bulk modify to create and change multiple work items with Team Web Access, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft Project. Use bulk modify to do one of the following tasks:

• Reassign or move several work items to a different iteration.

• Set the priorities or update the status for several work items.

• Reassign select work items to different team members.

• Review the current sprint tasks and update completed and remaining work.

Use Team Web Access when you have work items with fields where you want to assign the same value. Use Excel when you want to review a number of work items and update multiple fields with different values. If you already work in Project, then you might prefer instead to use it to perform bulk updates to work items that you want to publish.

Bulk modify using Team Web Access

The first step is to select the work items that you want to modify. Open the work items page and run a query that contains the items to update. Then, select the work items from the query results list as shown in the following illustration.

Select work items from Query Results

To specify a contiguous range of work items, press and hold the SHIFT key while you choose the first and last work item in the range. To specify a non-contiguous range, press and hold the CTRL key when you choose each work item.

Bulk assign

To reassign several work items, select the work items to reassign, and then open the shortcut menu. As the following illustration shows, you can then choose Assign to, and then choose the team member. You can choose several work items by holding down the Shift key.

Assign to shortcut menu option

Bulk move to a new iteration

Similar to the bulk assign task, you can move selected work items to a different iteration using Team Web Access. As the following illustration shows, select the work items, open the shortcut menu, choose Move to iteration, and then choose the iteration that you want.

Move to iteration shortcut menu option

Bulk update multiple fields

To update one or more work items with the same values for a few fields, you can use Team Web Access.

1. Select the work items from the Query Results view.

2. Open the shortcut menu for one of the selected items and choose Edit selected work items.

   Edit Work Items dialog box

   

3. Select the fields you want to update, and enter a value for each field that you select. Remember that all the selected work items will be updated with the new values.

4. Enter a description for your bulk modification task under the Notes for History, and then choose OK.

5. To commit the updates to the data store, choose Save Results. Note that Work Items shown in bold text indicate that the modifications are not yet published to the data store.

   

See Also

Concepts

Bulk add or modify work items with Excel

Find Bugs, Tasks, and Other Work Items

Other Resources

Tracking Work and Managing Workflow