Renaming the Title field in a list or site

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in a SharePoint installation is to dig down into the Site Columns and rename the Title column. At the time it might seem like the best thing in the world to do. The problem is that since the title field is hidden and included in every list in a SharePoint installation, you can have some unintended consequences. The next problem is that you will not be able to easily rename the column back to title. If you try to do this you will get an error message that says a column already exists with that name. That is because internally in SharePoint that column that you renamed is still called Title, no matter what you change the display name to.



The only way I have found to rename the Title column if you change it is to use SharePoint Manager. You can edit list columns in this program and rename the Title field back. I have not found any bad consequences by using this tool.