SharePoint Designer is the tool for designing and building SharePoint solutions. The tool is built in Visual Studio, but it is also available as a standalone application, which you can install on your computer and run. It allows you to design and build solutions that contain a combination of SharePoint elements, such as sites, lists, content types, workflow, etc. You can use SharePoint Designer to create and modify custom SharePoint solutions, and even publish them to SharePoint.
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What is SharePoint Designer?
The SharePoint Designer is a graphical tool that allows you to design the look and feel of a SharePoint solution, without needing to write any code. When designing the look and feel, you can create as many pages as you want, add lists and libraries, and then build the whole solution around your pages and lists. The SharePoint Designer interface has a number of features that make it easy to create new solutions.
The most important ones are:
- The New Site page is in the Site Actions menu.
This lets you start a new site that will have the same look and feel as any other site. You can start with an empty site or use an existing site template.
- Page layouts. This lets you create a common look for all the pages on your site.
You can define which pages should use a certain layout, and then add the layout to the pages as needed.
- Master pages. This lets you create a single master page for your site, and then add it to each page.
- Custom CSS. This lets you add your own CSS to the pages and lists. You can also define which CSS files should be used when a certain page is viewed.
- Add a Web Part. This lets you add web parts to any page on the site. You can also add web parts to lists and libraries. Create a new page and specify its appearance.
- Site pages. This lets you create site pages that include content and navigation, as well as any other elements that are necessary for a specific site.
- This lets you create lists and libraries for any purpose.
You can drag and drop elements from a palette to a page or list. You can define a page layout by dragging and dropping elements on a canvas. You can drag and drop elements from a library to a page or list. You can add custom controls to your pages, libraries and other SharePoint objects. You can edit HTML files with Visual Studio’s built-in HTML editor. The SharePoint Designer also allows you to create workflows, which are reusable codes that can be used to automate tasks such as document approval and publishing.
Workflows
Apart from all of the above-mentioned uses and solutions of SharePoint Designer, there is one more very important feature of this tool, which is to automate workflows in SharePoint. As mentioned earlier, we can use WSP builder to generate a workflow or add it manually. But the real power of using WSP Builder is that we can design and create the workflow without any coding knowledge.
This means that even if you are not a developer or have never coded before, you can still create and customize your own SharePoint workflows using the WSP builder.
Final Words:
SharePoint has a lot of different and important features included in it that are designed to meet all the possible needs of different working styles. It takes an expert to take maximum benefit from all these amazing features.
Al Rafay Consulting is a team of SharePoint developers who have a considerable amount of experience in working with this online platform. SharePoint branding & Design Services has a lot to offer to your online work so if you want to take the maximum output from this tool, please do not hesitate to contact us.
