SharePoint 2013 has a Quick Edit button to view and manage list items using a spreadsheet format. This replaces the Datasheet view in SharePoint 2010.

After recently upgrading my clients farm to SharePoint 2013 I noticed the new Quick Edit button was greyed out with message: “This control is currently disabled.” 

The cause of this in my situation was because all the Views for the Document Management structure in SharePoint was utilising ‘Group By’. Quick Edit can’t handle ‘Group By’.

If you try to create a new view of type ‘Datasheet View’ you’ll notice that the Group By options are missing.

To solve this problem you can easily just create a new view that is not using grouping and the ‘Quick Edit’ button will be enabled.

My problem, however, is that I would need to do this to hundreds of document libraries so took to PowerShell to do this for me.

Read my post on Creating a view for each Document Library in a Site Collection if you also need to do the same.

For other reasons why your Quick Edit may be greyed out check this blog post.