Metadata are used in sorting operations
In Acces, Problem Metadata, or simply Metadata, are pieces of information that describe a problem. Where a problem comes from, what objective it covers, and how many points it's worth are all examples of Metadata. Some Metadata, such as CodePath, Workspace, Points, and Objective are configured for you, although you may edit them if you wish. Other Metadata, such as Difficulty and Bloom's, need to be configured by you if you wish to use them.
Metadata help guide you during the creation of your documents. You can view the Metadata associated with your problems to help identify holes in your document or weaknesses in how the problems are arranged. For example, you may see that you're low on questions covering a certain learning objective. Or you may see that all your challenging questions are bunched in the beginning when they should appear towards the end.
Metadata are also used to sort problems in your documents. The dialog works by first selecting a Metadata field to sort by, then selecting a direction in which to sort. For example, to sort your problems by difficulty, with easiest problems first, sort your problems by Difficulty in Ascending order. Remember, if you want to sort by Difficulty or Bloom's, you must first enter the appropriate values for these metadata for the problems in your document.
Use the menu to show/hide the different Metadata fields Acces supports. This can be useful for reducing clutter in the Advanced and Grid views, since it lets you hide fields you're not interested in.
If you're already in Grid View, you can also set which Metadata fields are shown/hidden by right-clicking the Grid's column headers to bring up a popup menu.
Use the menu to set which Metadata field should be shown in the Document Tree, which is visible no matter what View you happen to be in.
As for Metadata in your printouts, use the Fonts and Misc and Answer Keys dialogs to set which Metadata fields you want printed on your documents.
Grid View is the best view to use when you need to do large amounts of Metadata editing. Its ability to display and edit multiple rows and columns of metadata all on one screen make Metadata editing quick and easy.
You can still edit Metadata in the other views, too. Right-click a problem in the Document Tree and select Properties from the shorcut menu to bring up a dialog that lets you change Metadata values. You can also use the built-in Metadata editor in Advanced View to accomplish the same thing.