On the SharePoint forums, someone occasionally asks about "changing the label of Title" or about "removing title from lists".
Bottom line: Don’t do it!
Sadly, the user interface allows a one-way change of that column label as shown:
Title is a column associated with the "Item" content type. Many, many, many CT’s use this column and if you change it here, it ripples out everywhere. There’s a good chance that you didn’t intend for that to happen. You were probably thinking to yourself, "I have a custom lookup list and ‘Title’ just doesn’t make sense as a column name, so I’m going to change it to ‘Status Code’ and add a description column." But if you follow through on that thought and rename ‘Title’ to ‘Status Code’, every list’s title (including document libraries) changes to "Status Code" and you probably didn’t intend for that to happen.
The real problem is that this is a one-way change. The UI "knows" that "title" is a reserved word. So, if you try and change "Status Code" back to "Title", it will prevent you and now you’ve painted yourself into a corner using paint that never dries 🙂
So what happens if you already changed it? I haven’t seen the answer we all want, which is a simple and easy method to change the label back to ‘Title’. Right now, the best advice is to change it to something like "Doc/Item Title". That’s a generic enough label that may not be too jarring for your users.
I have few other ideas which are on my to-do list of things to research:
- Contact Microsoft.
- Do something with the object model, maybe in conjunction with a feature.
- Figure out the database schema and manually update SQL. (You should contact Microsoft before doing this though; it will likely void your support contract).
If anyone knows how to solve this, please post a comment.
Update late afternoon, 11/15: I found this link that describes a method for creating a type of list that does not have a title column: http://www.venkat.org/index.php/2007/09/03/how-to-remove-title-column-from-a-custom-list/
Jeff