September 27, 2013 
In this series of blog posts I like to highlight some features of TFS/Visual Studio that people seem to overlook. In my day to day job I often see that people don’t know about certain feature that are available in Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio or some of the Powertools.
Some features are available as a Powertool. These can be downloaded from here
Earlier Posts
- Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 1 Annotate
- Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 2 Work Item State Diagrams
- Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 3 Editing multiple work items at the same time (Bulk Edit)
- Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 4 Finding status in Source Control
- Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 5 Handling alerts and notifications
- Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 6 Managing workspaces in TFS with Workspace templates
- Hidden Gems in TFS–Part 7 Searching and Finding Work Items in Team Foundation Server
- Hidden Gems in TFS 2012–Part 8 Related Work Items in a Build Report
- Hidden Gems in TFS 2012–Part 9 Image compare in TFS Version Control
In this part……
Editing multiple items at the same time
Yesterday I received a comment on my hidden gems post about editing multiple work items (Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 3 Editing multiple work items at the same time (Bulk Edit)). I wrote this post a long time ago and it became old.
Hereby a short update for this hidden gem, because in TFS 2012 Microsoft Managed to make it still a bit hidden.
Excel
Excel is still supported in TFS 2012. You can open a query in Excel and edit items. This is still the same as described in my earlier post
Visual Studio
With Visual Studio it is not possible to bulk edit multiple items. However, you can select the items you like and export those items to excel to do the bulk edit.
Just open or create a work item query and choose Open Selection in Microsoft Excel
Web Access Client
The Web Access client still contains the bulk edit, only it is even more hidden than it was before.
Open a Query in Web Access (from the Work Tab), Choose the work item you would like to edit (holding Shift and CTRL for multiselection just works !) and click with your right mouse button.
Choose [Edit selected work item(s)]
A new window pops up where you can fields and values you would like to change
Press [Ok] when you are done. All items are edited but are not saved yet. Press the save button to save all results
Hope this helps !
The Road to ALM 
Thanks for posting the update
Hidden gem, or hidden danger? Is there concern about ability to bulk update work items so easily? How easily, or accidentally could this be misused?
agreed. With great power, comes great responsibility.. You can screw up pretty bad.. But three is always history that you can use to trace back the changes..