The way I learned (a long time ago ) to hide fields in the New/Edit/Display forms of a list was to create new forms, set them as default and manually go in and remove the fields I wanted hidden. Of course the way to do that is using SharePoint Designer. The problem is that, if someone goes in and adds another column/field to the list, it doesn’t automatically show up in these forms, the way they would have done when using the default ListForm Web Part which is used as default on these forms.

I’ve come across a much easier and a much better way to handle this. The base principle is that with the default ListForm web part, any new fields which are created show up by default. When you need to have certain fields not show, what you can do to keep this functionality is as follows:

• Click the List tab in the Ribbon.
• Click on the List Settings Button.
• Under List Settings, click on Advanced Settings
• The top item is “Allow management of content types?” – click the ‘Yes’ radio button and then ‘OK’ to get back to the List Settings page.
• Scroll down to about the middle where it lists Content Types, and shows the Content Type used for your list. Click that Content Type.
• On the next page, you will see a list of columns, as you did in the page before. Here’s where all the magic happens.
• Click on the column name you wish to hide.
• Here, you will see other Column Settings you may not have seen before.
• Look on the far right for ‘This column is’.
• Select the radio button that says “Hidden (Will not appear in forms)” and then click OK.

That’s all there is to it. You can do this for each field you don’t want to ‘surface’ in your forms.
Note: At this point, normally, I also go back in and turn off management of content types.