Share Point Designer

Share Point Designer – A definite Maybe

SharePoint Designer does have some great qualities that at first glance get you really excited about using it. I could make some analogy here likening SharePoint Designer to an attractive girl you meet at a bar and before you know it you wake up in a bathtub full of ice missing a kidney, but I’ll refrain. So, what’s good about

Don’t have to develop on a the server

Probably the most awesome thing about SharePoint Designer is that you don’t have to develop on the freaking server! This is phenomenal for those developers who have to get SOMETHING done and they don’t have access to the necessary development tools. This was my ONLY option for development for the first 6 months that we were using and learning about SharePoint. You do however need to be a site owner on the site in question.

Modifying ASPX files, Master Pages, and CSS

SharePoint Designer is great for modifying and maintaining your ASPX pages, Master Pages, and Cascading Style Sheets. It especially is useful in browsing through and learning SharePoint’s massive CSS files. SharePoint Designer has a pretty good WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) as well which can really help when designing and creating themes.

Prototyping

SharePoint Designer is great for throwing together a quick Prototype on your development servers and getting it in front of people to build some excitement about SharePoint and show what SharePoint is capable of.

SharePoint Designer Workflows

The second best thing about SharePoint Designer are the SharePoint Designer Workflows. SharePoint Designer comes with quite a few workflows that can be connected to a SharePoint List and can be set up to be executed manually, when an item is created, or when an item is changed. Some of things you can easily do with these workflows are:

• Send emails, including emails to individuals who created a list item or executed the workflow
• Do simple business calculations and store those values in your lists
• Create lists
• Update lists

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