Hiding a Field can be useful if you don’t want your Users to be able to edit a specific field. Mattias Karlsson, a friend of mine, describes a step-by-step on achieving this on his blog. In this Post, I’m going to describe how to do it through PowerShell. First make a connection to the specific Field, then simply set the ShowInNewForm and ShowInEditForm properties to $false. This will hide the fields from the User when the user is trying to create or edit a List Item.

The image below shows the list that I’m going to edit. I will remove the UserField so that Users editing Items in this List won’t be able to edit the UserField

We can hide the fields through a simple function.

function Hide-SPField([string]$url, [string]$List, [string]$Field) {
  [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")

  $SPSite = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($url)
  $OpenWeb = $SPSite.OpenWeb()

  $OpenList = $OpenWeb.Lists[$List]

  $OpenField = $OpenList.Fields[$Field]
  $OpenField.ShowInNewForm = $False
  $OpenField.ShowInEditForm = $False
  $OpenField.Update()

  $SPSite.Dispose()
  $OpenWeb.Dispose()
}

Hide-SPField -url http://moss -List "My Custom List" -Field "UserField"

Now, when the user clicks on New Item or Edit Item, the UserField won’t be visible.