Customizing the Sharepoint List New Item and Edit Item Screens

Customizing the Sharepoint List New Item and Edit Item Screens

A quick look at how to hide fields (example: field for the default Title column inserted in lists by default that doesn’t always prove useful for the list.).

Here we’ve started with a new Vacation Calendar List to track when people will be in and out of the office for various reasons. This can also be useful as an approval mechanism with some simple workflows attached, but that’s another topic.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the item in the list has no title, but we don’t really need one for this list. We want to track a number of things but we don’t need a freeform text box for any of them. What we want to track:

1. Start Date of Vacation (Date Field)
2. End Date of Vacation (Date Field)
3. Employee Name (Person Field, Validated against company directory)
4. Reason for Time Off (Drop Down Selection)

We can easily remove the Title column from our view by selecting the View drop down and choosing Modify this View:

This opens the Edit View screen where you can select the checkboxes to display or not display an item. Here we can chose to remove the Title column from our All Items View.

Next click the OK button to return to the All Items view and the Title Column is gone. I also added the Edit Item column as the first item in this view so we have a way to edit items in the list since the Title column was our default link to the Edit Item screen.

This is all great. However, when users add a new item to the list they are still prompted to input a Title. It is also present on the Edit Items screen. Ideally we would like to hide this column and its corresponding fields completely.

To fix this we need to go to the Advanced Settings screen under List Settings.

Select Allow Management of Content Types and click the OK button.

Now when you return to the Settings screen you will see a new section called Content Types. We want to click on the Item link.

Then click the Title link on the List Content Type Screen.

Finally select the radio button for Hidden (Will not appear in forms) and then click the OK button.

Now when you return to the New and Edit Screens the column will no longer be visible. You will also want to verify that Title is not required to have content. If you want to avoid the display of (No Title) on the Edit screen and any workflow emails then you can simply specify a default value of something like “Vacation List Entry.” These can both be done through the normal List Settings screen.

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