How to disable Document Information Panel in Word 2010?

Question

I am using SharePoint 2013 and Word and InfoPath 2010.

I use a document template in my document library (content type). The information panel in word didn't bother me in the first place but then someone changed a property that shouldn't be changed. But there is no way to 'hide' one column from the panel right?

Then I changed the panel with InfoPath and this seemed to work fine but my colleagues had an error report because they had no InfoPath installed.

So what do I want to achieve? I want to disable the information panel in general. Is this possible? It would be even better to hide one column without using InfoPath but I think that isn't possible.

Thanks for any helpful tips.

Answer 1

I don't think you can disable the DIP. The only setting available through the UI is to force the apparition of the DIP: go to the CT settings, "Document Information Panel settings", and ensure "Always show DIP..." is checked or unchecked.
With that, the DIP should show up only if a required field is needed (and maybe also at initial doc creation, I'm not sure, this has to be checked).

However, there's a dev approach that should allow you to set a specific field to not show in the DIP!
Here's the C# code I have in my archives:

public static void SetShowInDIP(SPField field, bool showInDIP)
{
   XmlDocument fieldSchemaXml = new XmlDocument();
   fieldSchemaXml.LoadXml(field.SchemaXml);
   XmlAttribute showInFileDlgAttribute = fieldSchemaXml.CreateAttribute("ShowInFileDlg");
   showInFileDlgAttribute.Value = showInDIP.ToString().ToUpper();
   XmlNode fieldXmlNode = fieldSchemaXml.SelectSingleNode("Field");
   XmlAttributeCollection fieldAttributes = fieldXmlNode.Attributes;
   fieldAttributes.Append(showInFileDlgAttribute);

   field.SchemaXml = fieldXmlNode.OuterXml;
   field.Update();
}

I think you can easily translate it into PowerShell if needed.