4. Introduction to SharePoint Designer 2007
In this Chapter
Have you ever had requests from your users to make minor tweaks or changes to the layout of content in a Web Part? Have you ever tried to use the out-of-the-box (OOB) Web Parts and discovered that you can do everything you need except for one small piece? In this chapter, we’ll be going over the most common uses of SharePoint Designer and explaining how it can be a powerful tool to enhance your SharePoint solutions. Using SharePoint Designer (SPD), you can add elements to your SharePoint site that provide immediate value to your team. What if your end users could look at a SharePoint site and see all outstanding tasks that are due today highlighted in yellow and any tasks that were due yesterday in red? What if you could customize the New Items form to be displayed in a format that your end users were used to, or your View Item form could display not only the item but also all the tasks and documents associated with the item? All of these things can be done using SharePoint Designer! And, best of all, you can do them with no code and no development experience. Using SPD, you can take your SharePoint sites to the next level by doing things that in the past were only possible through code. In addition to some of the changes mentioned here, you can also create custom workflows, branding, customized Web Parts, and site reports. SPD can also be used as a tool to display data from multiple non-SharePoint data sources.