What are the impact of hidding the Item Title from sharepoint lists

Question

We are working on a sharepoint 2013 Team site collection. and inside this team site i have added many tracking lists. now our customer asked us that they want to hide the Title field from all the lists. now i know that i can do these 2 steps:-

1. inside the related Content Types to set the Title column as hidden.
2. also to go to the site column named Title and set it as "Optional".

so in this case users can add tracking items without the need to enter a title.

Now when i did this i noted that i will be facing these issues:-

1. many build-in features will be lost. such as the ability to have a field inside the list view named Title (linked to item with edit menu) which is not available inside any other column types.this field allow use to have a menu to edit, view, approve/reject items..
2. Also sharepoint search rely on the item title.

so can anyone advice how i need to approach hiding the items' Title field, should this be avoided ?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you don't want to use Title as Title, you typically rename it to something more contextual to what the list is storing so you don't lose the link to item with edit menu control block.

As you've indicated, hiding the title field negatively impacts search and makes it more difficult to edit items. You can try setting another field to be the title field, I've done that in the past with mixed results.

See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/microsoft.sharepoint.spfield.listitemmenu.aspx and https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/microsoft.sharepoint.spfield.listitemmenuallowed.aspx.

Answer 2

Whether or not the field is hidden depends on the solution.

Allow users to open display (view) and edit forms

Option 1 – Use a default value and hide the field

To retain a link to the item in list views, and not have users enter data in the field, you can set the Title field’s default value to something generic such as “View Item,” and then set the field to hidden. This way the Title field text is populated for all items, but does not need to be entered by users, and is available to add to views which allow users to access the list forms (edit and display).

There are a couple issues with this. Search results for list items display the Title field so search results would display a listing of “View Item” when items that matched a search query are displayed. This may not be a problem if you train users to use list specific searching such as column filtering, managed navigation, or in-place list search in SharePoint 2013, 2016, and Online.

Option 2 – Use the view setting “Edit” button

Keep the Title field hidden, and add the “Edit” button to all views. This will launch the items edit form with one click.

Unable to add new column named Title

Check out http://www.thesaurus.com/ for a synonym, or name your new field something like “Task Title.”