How to rename Figma layers in bulk from a spreadsheet using CopyDoc

Video Transcript

Today I’m going to be showing you how to automatically rename your Figma layers from a spreadsheet using the CopyDoc Figma plugin.

To get started, all we need to do is go to your Figma file, click on the little “Resources” icon here, and search for “CopyDoc”, and Under the “Plugins” tab, you’ll see the CopyDoc Figma plugin pop-up. All you need to do to run it is just click on this “Run” button here. Or, I’d recommend clicking on this more options icon here and clicking “Save Figma plugin.” That’s just going to save it to your Figma plugins list for later. I’ve already gone ahead and done that, so I’m just going to right-click anywhere, go down to plugins, then go down to saved plugins, and click on the CopyDoc Figma plugin. And that’s just going to run the Figma plugin that we just saved a second ago.

We’re going to be focusing on this sync spreadsheet content feature down here. There’s a bunch of other options in the Figma plugin that I’m not going to go through. You can check out the playlist on YouTube for CopyDoc if you want to check out those other features. But today, I’m just going to be focusing on how to actually rename your Figma layers, like these, from a spreadsheet in Google Sheets or an Excel file using this sync content feature. So, I’ll show you how to do that now.

Let’s say we want to rename these three frames. So, we’ve got these three Figma frames that are all named “my frame.” So, I want to change the names of those automatically. So, what I can do is I can go to my spreadsheet. So, I’m just going to open up a new Google Sheet, and you can see here I’ve basically added the name of those layers as the top item, so row number one, and that’s going to be my column header. So, the column header name basically just has to match whatever the name of your Figma layer is in the file. And then, what you want to do is add the names that you want to rename the layers to underneath that column title. So, what you basically want to do is go through and add the names that you want the Figma layers to be called underneath that column. And then, that’s going to automatically sync up in Figma. So, I’ll show you what that looks like now.

If you set up your file like this and then click on the share button up here, so just click on “share,” and then just make sure that this General access setting is set to “anyone with the link,” and then just click on “copy link.” And once you’ve copied it, you can go back to your Figma plugin, click on the sync content feature in the Figma plugin, and then what you want to do is just paste in your public Google sheet link here. So, paste that in, and that’s going to load up the Google Sheets tabs. And I’ve got two tabs in my Google sheet, so it’s going to give me two different options. I’m just going to select the Figma frame names tab that I’ve got set up, which is coming from down here, and I’m just going to go ahead and click on “use selected sheet.” And that’s going to load up the rows that we just added from the spreadsheet.

Once that finishes loading, it’ll give you an option to sync those layers up with your Figma layers. So, what you basically want to do is select the three layers that we just wanted to sync up. So, I’m going to select those three frames that are all called “my frame,” just to match up with the column name here. And then, what I’m going to do is just click on the “Sync Rows” button here. So, I’m going to click on “Sync Rows,” and you can see that it’s updated content for three layers. And we can see now that the layers that we just had in Figma have been renamed. So, we’ve basically renamed the three layers that we selected to be the same as what we had in our spreadsheet. So, you can see that those have been synced up nicely. So, that’s basically what it looks like. We can also do that for inner content. So, we don’t just have to do it for frames; we can do it for individual layers as well.

I’ve got a second tab set up on the spreadsheet here, and I basically want to rename these images. So, I’ve got these images in these frames, and at the moment, they’re just all named “Avatar.” So, I’ve got a little hash called “hash Avatar,” and all of them are named the same. But I want them to be different based on the content of the photo. So, what I can do in this case is the same process. I can basically add “Avatar” as my column name, and then I can just add in the target Figma layer names that I want them to become when I import that into Figma. And at the same time, I’m also going to update some text layers. So, the text layers are all called “username,” and I’ve also added the hash “username” as my second column here. And I’ve done the same thing. I’ve added the content that I want that text to be changed to. And the important thing to note here is basically, if you’re naming the text layers the same as what you’ve got in your column, it’s automatically going to update the text content. And if you’re naming it the same as the layer in Figma, if it’s not a text layer, so for example, the frame that we just did or the image layers that we’re going to be doing in a minute, that’s automatically going to rename the layer. So, the general rule is that if the layer is not a text layer and you’ve added it into your spreadsheet’s link, it’s just automatically going to change the name of that layer. Obviously, because it doesn’t have any text content, it’s not going to do that. But if it’s a text layer, it will update the text content.

Now that we’ve got that set up, I’m going to do the exact same thing. I’m just going to go back to my Figma plugin, reopen the sync content feature, and drop in my spreadsheet URL. So, I’m just going to copy that again, copy the link, paste that in. And this time, I’m just going to select the “user card details” tab. So, I’m going to select that and use that as my selected sheet. Click on the “use selected sheet” button. And this time, I’m just going to highlight all of my frames. So, I’m just going to highlight all these frames. And what that’s going to do is it’s going to loop through each of those frames and match any layers that have the same name inside of them with the content that we just added in the spreadsheet. So, I’ll show you what that looks like. If we now click on the “Sync Rows” button, we can do that now. So, click on “Sync Rows,” and you can see here that it’s gone through and updated six Figma layers. So, we’ve got our images. The layer names have all been updated. These are now saying “Avatar” with the person’s name in them rather than just “hash Avatar.” And it’s also gone through and changed the text content for each of those layers. So, you can see what that looks like there.

The other thing that you can do that’s probably worth mentioning, as I mentioned at the start of the Figma tutorial, is that you can also use an Excel spreadsheet, just a normal Excel spreadsheet file. So, if I undo those text updates and layer name updates that we just did from Google Sheets, I’m just going to undo those now. I’m going to open up the Excel file. So, if I basically save my Google Sheet to an Excel file, if I download that to Excel, and if I open up that file in Excel, so if I open up Excel now and just open up that spreadsheet, we can see here that the contents are formatted exactly the same. So, we’ve got the exact same content. It’s just in an Excel spreadsheet file. And so, what we can do is we can actually go back into the sync content feature, and instead of pasting in the public Google sheet, we can actually just drag and drop that Excel file. So, we can drag and drop the Excel file directly from our computer into this little Drop Zone area. So, I’m going to do that now. And because it’s local, it’s very quick. It just loads it directly from your computer. It doesn’t need to go to the internet to fetch that information. So, we can see here the tabs have loaded up really quickly. And again, we can just select our “user card details” tab, click on “use selected sheet,” and then we can basically just highlight those layers again. And you can also select the order that you want to import the content. So, by default, it will just do it from top left to bottom right. So, for example, it’ll just go one, two, three, four, five, six in rows. But you can also change that if you needed to, to be sorted visually in columns or by the layer order or by the Figma layer age or layer name. So, you’ve got a bunch of different options there with the sync order. So, I can just do this as an example to sync it by reverse. In this case, I’m just going to reverse the row order. And I’m just going to click on “Sync Rows” again. And you can see this time, it’s again updated the six Figma layers from the spreadsheet, but this time it’s done it from Excel, just an Excel file. And you can see, because I changed the order, the order is now reversed. So, you can see that at the bottom right, we’ve got Albert, and then Michael, then Adam. So, it’s going in reverse order of the spreadsheet. And this is in contrast to what we did before, which was just going by order from top left to bottom right, which was going through all of these in order like that.

That’s basically what it looks like. I just want to show you that you can use a Microsoft Excel file if you don’t want to use Google Sheets. But you’ve got the option there regardless of which platform you prefer. So, that’s basically it for today. I’ll leave it there and keep it pretty simple. Feel free to experiment with this in your own workflow. I’m sure you can come up with some more complicated versions of this, where you can rename, you know, hundreds or thousands of layers in one go and hopefully save yourself a lot of time with your team. So, thank you as always for watching, and we’ll be back soon with more Figma tutorials like this one soon.