Plenty of folks talk about variations on a theme here. I’ve hidden the Title field before, no big deal. The order I happen to use this time was a little confusing though.
I have a list where I know I’m using content types. So right after I’ve created the list, before I do anything else I turn on Advanced Settings –> Allow management of content types and then add my content types to the list. Within those content types, I have the Title field hidden. Within the ‘inherited from’ content types, the Title field is hidden. I figure I’m covered. Now when I open the list in datasheet mode and add a new row of information I get an error. First it was that a required field was not in the view so I needed to add a handful of columns back in. Then, I attempted again to add an item and the Title field gets the red box. What the heck? It’s supposed to be hidden. I tried changing lots of different settings all over the place but nothing worked. Frustrating.
Maybe you’ve seen this, maybe you haven’t – but it stumped me for a while before figuring out the simple solution thanks to Marc Anderson’s post. All I needed to do at this point was turn off the List Settings –> Advanced Settings –> Allow management of content types, then make the Title field not required, then turn Advanced mode back on. Even though I’d done the same thing to all the content types (including Item), I still needed to explicitly change the setting on the field itself. Makes sense once you figure it out, but quite frustrating when you’re in the mix trying to make it work.