Autofill Columns in WorkPoint

Autofill Columns can be applied to a wide range of document management scenarios where structured metadata is critical. Typical use cases include:

• Automatic document summarization: Generate short summaries of documents to give users quick insight without opening the file.
• Metadata extraction and tagging: Extract key details such as document type, stakeholders, dates, or categories and store them directly in metadata fields.
• Content classification: Identify and categorize documents (e.g. contracts, reports, compliance documents) based on their content.
• Business-specific data enrichment: Populate fields like project names, regions, or responsible parties to align documents with business processes and structures.
• Supporting automation and workflows: Provide structured data that can be consumed by WorkPoint Automate or other processes for routing, approvals, or compliance checks.

In WorkPoint, these configurations are typically defined once on a master site and then synchronized across all entity sites, ensuring a consistent setup across the entire solution.

Autofill Columns deliver value by addressing one of the most common challenges in document management: incomplete, inconsistent, or missing metadata.

• Reduced manual work: Users no longer need to spend time tagging documents manually, as AI performs the extraction and population automatically.
• Improved data quality and consistency: Metadata is generated uniformly across all documents, reducing errors and eliminating “dark data” where files lack useful information.
• Faster access to information: Automatically generated summaries and metadata make it easier to understand and find documents quickly.
• Stronger search, governance, and compliance: With complete and structured metadata, organizations gain better searchability, improved governance, and stronger control over their information.
• Better foundation for automation: High-quality metadata enables more reliable workflows, reporting, and AI-driven processes across the organization.

AutoFill columns require Microsoft 365 Copilot or Syntex / SharePoint Premium licensing to be available in the tenant.

Additionally, Autofill Columns work only on Document Libraries, not on Lists, and only new documents - not existing ones - are processed after setting up Autofill Columns.

As always, WorkPoint recommends columns be created as site columns. For use with Autofill Columns, WorkPoint recommends to create a site column on the Master site, then add it to the Document Library where needed. Autofill Column properties can then be configured on the column on the Document Library and then synchronized to entity sites.

The example below shows the process of configuring Autofill Column properties on a column (ccDocSummary) created using the process mentioned above. We have also added a document for testing the Autofill column settings:

1. On the Documents library on the Master site, we click the Summary column, select "Column settings", and "Edit".

2. In the Edit column panel, we can enable the Autofill feature on the Summary column.
3. In the "Prompt" field, if a document already exists in the library, SharePoint will provide a prompt suggestion, which we can use. You can also refresh it to get a new suggestion using the "Refresh" button. Alternatively, you can write your own prompt. In this instance, we use our own prompt:

4. Since we already have a document in the library, we can select it under "Select a test file" and click the "Test" button. The result is shown in the "Result" field:

5. The result of our test can be viewed in the Result field.
6. To save the Autofill column settings, we click the "Save" button in the bottom of the panel.

From here, we have added a new column called "Budget" (ccDocBudget), and enabled Autofill columns for it with the following prompt:

We can now synchronize the columns, including their Autofill column settings to our entity sites.

Since we are working with projects, we open the Master Site Synchronization page for our Projects module:

7. In the Master Site Collection section, we enable "Replicate Site Columns" because the columns we created, we created as site columns on the master site.
8. In the "Master Site Lists Synchronization" section, we enable "Replicate Fields" and "Replicate Views" for the Documents library.
9. We can then start the synchronization. In this case, we run it on all project entities.

Once completed, we can go to one of our entity sites and see if the Documents library there now has the columns:

10. On our "Project Blue" project, we can see the columns now. The small icons next to each column indicates that Autofill column settings are enabled for the columns.

We can now try uploading a document to the library and see if the columns get filled automatically:

After a few seconds, the columns get filled automatically: