At the first impression the Typo3 backend often seems to be too full and complex. But Typo3 has a lot of functions to customize the backend for our needs. The following example shows, how to hide the unused columns.

To hide the columns left, right and border follow the following steps:

• Go to the Root-Page of your Website
• Click on "Edit page header"
• Add this line to the TSConfig field:

  mod.SHARED.colPos_list=0

• Save and Finish

This way only the normal column shows up in the backend. You can add here a comma-separated list of the columns that should be shown. To show for example the normal and the left column use this snippet:

mod.SHARED.colPos_list=0,1

The values for the columns are the following:

0 ... Normal

1 ... Left

2 ... Right

3 ... Border

More information can be found here

http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/tutorials/doc_tut_quickstart_de/current/view/1/9/#id2857585