How to hide properties in Document Information Panel – SharePoint

Document Information Panel – This is the window which shows all the properties associated with the document. Let it be out of the box / default properties (like Title, Keywords), or custom properties or content type properties.

Wait, what are content type properties?

Consider a scenario where you have a SharePoint site and a document library. You create some site columns and then create content type for your document library. (Inheriting from the document content type). Now you associate this newly created content type to your document library and done.

You go ahead and click on create New Document link and Word Editor opens up. Now there you see the Document Information Panel (DIP) containing all the site columns in your content type. These are metadata holders for your document. And that’s why these document properties are called as content type properties.

In Following Image, I have opened the document from the SharePoint document library and added Version and Comments column in the default document content type , which are visible in DIP.

Issue:

There were some of the content type properties which were getting displayed in DIP, but I didn’t want users to see those /change those. In short I needed to hide those.

Let’s try to hide version property from DIP.

Solution:

First thought comes to mind like – ok these properties are nothing but the site columns right? So why don’t we just delete the site columns and get rid of properties in DIP? But NO. Because if we delete the site columns from the content type , the DIP won’t show the property but document will not be holding the metadata for that column.

So what could be done?

Trick I found is, just hide the site column.

How we can do it?

Library settings > Find your content type and click on it > select the site column which you don’t want to see in DIP > click on Hidden option in advanced option and select ok.

Now DIP will not show the content type property when creating new documents from the library

Version column gets hidden from DIP

Note: This approach is used only when the site column is not of type mandatory/required. As per my knowledge you cannot hide the column which is required.