Use friendly 'developer' column names

When you create new columns in your SharePoint site, an internal name is created from the entered display name. SharePoint uses this internally for what it does and if you use SharePoint Designer to create custom pages for your lists, document libraries, etc. then this internal name is what you interact with.

The internal name (FieldName) is generated by replacing any spaces with _x0020_, so for example, if you create a column called Registration of Interest, the generated FieldName will be Registration_x0020_of_x0020_Interest. You can see this by looking at the field parameter in the URL when editing the column:

In this case, SharePoint encodes the '_' as %5F, which makes it even more messy.

Now if you only work with out of the box configuration through the browser then that's fine, you don't need to worry about the FieldName. But if you work with SharePoint Designer then it becomes horrible to look at, less than to use.

What can you do? If you rename a site column, all you are doing is changing the display name, the FieldName remains the same. So when you create a new column, give it the name you want to use internally, then change it afterwards to what you want it to display. In our above example, we would create the column by calling it RegistrationOfInterest (alternatively RegOfInterest or even RoI). Once the column is created we can then rename it to Registration of Interest but the FieldName will still be RegistrationOfInterest. A lot easier to use.

You can also use this trick when creating lists and libraries to create friendlier URLs. A list called Training Providers will display /Training%20Providers/ in the URL, but if you name the list TrainingProviders on creation, then rename it, the URL portion will remain /TrainingProviders/.