Finding Empty Fields Quickly, Easily, and Hack-y

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There were some missing description fields on a site I was working on. I filled them in because that is what one does when you find an empty description field or alt tag. This, of course, made me worried about all the other sites we maintain. So I started in on checking them.

Since the sites I am working on are with Drupal, I needed to figure out the quickest yet easiest way to get a spreadsheet of nodes with missing descriptions. Views popped into my mind right away because Views can make a table. You can quickly set up a view with the fields you need to check on.

Here is my hacky way of getting the info out of Drupal and into a spreadsheet. I was able to get all the information I needed from five sites in under ten minutes with this though.

  1. Make a view and name it something you can remember (ex: junk).
  2. Make a block in your view and set it to table under format.
  3. Add the fields you need to check on. Mine are Title, Description, and Link to Content.
  4. Set Link to Content to output the URL as text and to use absolute link.
  5. In the preview, you will now have a table of all your content. Copy that table and paste it into your spreadsheet app.
  6. Delete the view if you are done with it.

There are probably other ways but this gets the job done for me.

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