SharePoint document library - purpose of the Title column

Question

I understand that SharePoint 2007 indexes the "Title" metadata of a word document but what I don't understand is why is there also a column called "Title" within the document library? What is its purpose?

The issue is that we're asking people to specify the title of documents via the "info" option in Word. When they upload the document they are asked again to specifiy the title, I'm tempted to hide the title column from the upload screen but I'm not sure if this is good practice.

Thanks

Answer 1

SharePoint's "Title" field is a property of the list item that contains the document, whereas the document title is of course a property of the document itself. The SP field is what shows up when you are browsing the library through SharePoint.

Unfortunately, it doesn't auto-populate from the associated document, since in many cases there wouldn't be a direct mapping anyway.

You can hide the field, technically, but you'll need to populate the title somehow so users can effectively browse documents (or just show the file name). Some possible options (I haven't tried anything like this unfortunately so these are just some quick results):

http://autofilltitle.codeplex.com/

http://www.xstreamsoftware.com/SharepointAutoTitle.htm

Answer 2

A good example of the use of the title column is my current project where users are uploading literally millions of documents and we will give a not nice name where the Title provides a nice name.

I would say it is your UI, hide the Title column if you want. I hide the Title column in some of my custom lists such as a config list that a title doesn't make sense.