Reverting to a SharePoint 2010 default list form once it’s been customized…

So today’s adventure involved fixing someone’s custom list form that had “broken”. They said that it used to look one way, and then something happened and now it looks different and things at the top of the form are gone. Not a lot to go on, but that’s my job… figure things out based on people explaining issues in terms they understand.

After some thought and observation, I figured out that someone had gone into Customize Form on the list’s Ribbon Bar and saved/published a new version of the form. It’s close to the same look as the default form, but things like the Attach File icon and the buttons at the bottom of the form disappear. I also confirmed that the displayifs.aspx, newifs.aspx, and editifs.aspx versions of the forms (customized versions) were showing up as present in SharePoint Designer.

Now… how do I revert back to the default form?

It was easier than I thought… If you go into List Tools > List > Library Settings, you’ll see an option titled Form Setting under General Settings. When you open that option, select the Use The Default SharePoint Form option, and your customized forms will no longer be the default.

I tried to solve this earlier in the week for someone, and I ended up having to recreate the list from scratch and copy over the data. Obviously, this approach is MUCH easier…