The Design View no longer exists in SharePoint Designer 2013. This changes the way we work with (or used to work with) all sorts of visual elements in SharePoint.
I have been meaning to write this post for a very long time, but there is so much I want to say, I couldn’t find the time until now to hunker down and say it all (or at least most of it). So here we go.
Note: I have always been a visual kind of guy and I like to show things instead of just describing them. This post will be no different. Below, I have provided visuals that will be helpful for the reader to understand the impact of Design View removal from SharePoint Designer.
What exactly has changed?
SharePoint Designer 2010 with Design View
SharePoint Designer 2013 without Design View
What the above images mean is that you can only see Code View for any and all pages now in SharePoint Designer 2013. No more Design View (or Split View for that matter) and no more WYSIWYG functionality on any of the following types of pages:
- Site Pages (Wiki Pages)
- List View pages / Library View pages
- Web Part Pages
The Impact
Now that you know what has changed, let’s look at the type of functionality that is going to be missing in SharePoint Designer 2013.
List View / List Form web parts and Data View / Data Form web parts are inserted and modified in SharePoint Designer 2010 to show data from all sorts of sources including the following:
- Lists
- Libraries
- Databases
- Web Services (both SOAP and REST)
If you have time, check out the video below to see a sample of the type of coolness you can produce using these web parts with SharePoint Designer 2010. This video shows creating and modifying a SharePoint List Form in Design View:
Here is a link to this same video on SharePoint-Videos.com:
http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/sp10create-custom-list-form-pages-using-sharepoint-designer/
SharePoint Designer 2013 still has the implementations of these web parts, however, there is no way to visually modify them the way it is shown in the video. You would have to jump into Code View to manipulate the XSLT and XML manually to produce the same results.
Conditional Formatting is one of the most Awesome features in SharePoint Designer 2010. You can use it to conditionally format and/or display data and images on any SharePoint page as shown in image below.
With the absence of Design View, there is no visual way to configure the web parts (List View and Data View) to conditionally format text and other objects in SharePoint Designer 2013.
There is a very easy way in SharePoint Designer 2010 to connect web parts together using web part connections on the same page or even across pages. These connections can pass field values which can then be used to filter data and more.
No way to make the web part connections in SharePoint Designer 2013. You can still, however, make web part connections on the same page using the web browser.
The Formula window (also referred to as the XPath Expression builder) lets us present incoming data using all types of different formulae such as concat, average, count, substring, formatDate and dozens more like them.
In SharePoint Designer 2013, you can still insert the formulae, but it would have to be done directly in Code View since the Design View is required for the Insert Formula window to be presented.
In SharePoint Designer 2010, there are small tweaks that we can perform for web parts that we take for granted currently such as adjusting width of columns, modifying column headings, adding/removing columns etc. This is all accomplished in the Design View of course.
Can’t do any of that stuff in SharePoint Designer 2013 due to the lack of Design View (sorry to sound like a broken record now).
All of the modifications listed above are supposed to migrate seamlessly to SharePoint 2013. However, after the migration, the maintenance of these solutions would have to be a manual code based process.
I’m sure there is stuff that I forgot to mention. I’ll update the post as I think of more things to draw a more complete picture for the readers of this post.
Justification for removing Design View
In Microsoft’s own words:
No comment from me.
Related Post
My MVP buddies have already started a good discussion thread out on the forums regarding this subject:
The thread contains comments, thoughts and opinions from many highly regarded folks in the industry such as Marc Anderson, Laura Rogers, Jennifer Mason, John White, Tom Resing, Paul Stork, Christina Wheeler, Stephen Cawood, Mike Walsh and more (sorry if I missed you). I would recommend joining the discussion and voicing your opinion on how this change can affect your environment and company.
What should You do?
If you are a Power User who loves working with and creating no-code solutions on SharePoint, you are the one most affected by this change. There is no replacement for the functionality lost in any other product that I know of so far. SharePoint Designer was it and now there is none! In SharePoint 2013, there will be no other built in functionality that will let you manage these no-code solutions visually. If you know of something I don’t, I would love for you to comment about it below.
This decision has created a huge ‘Vendor Opportunity’. I do foresee a vendor creating a solution for this in the future so when someone asks me what they should do now, I can at least say ‘There is an App for that’!
SharePoint Designer 2013 Design View is Gone! - effects Data View web part and List View web part ,
Asif Rehmani
Trainer / Consultant / Speaker / Author on all things SharePoint and InfoPath. Asif is a SharePoint Server MVP and MCT who loves the process of transfering his knowledge to others. For a complete Bio of Asif Rehmani, please visit this page: http://www.sharepoint-videos.com/about/
Asif,
Great visualization of the impact of the change. I can’t wait to see the app for this!
Tom
If nobody migrate to this version maybe microsoft will change strategy
It is by far one of my most missed features in SharePoint 2013. Thank you for helping brining visibility to this very big change.
S.
After many many months of knowing what’s coming, it is still hard for me to believe the Huge impact this will create in the community. I guess we’ll all have to just wait and see how folks in the SharePoint community as a whole react to it.
Bah. Although most work is done in code view, it does seem quite a bold move to remove design view entirely. I guess the days of poking through the visuals to quickly find the right code are over. Training wheels off, better enjoy scrolling!
Maybe I’m missing something vital here. But SharePoint 2013 supports the app model now. And everything is considered an app. A list, a library, a web part — its all apps. And these apps are hosted in a separate web server on premise or not. And this rendering process uses any web technology. So you could create a page of web controls in ASP.NET and feed it into your sharepoint site. Right?
If thats true, why are you messing with web parts in the first place? Shouldn’t you be doing HTML and javascript anyways.
And for backward compatibility Microsoft said the 14 hive would be present and sharepoint 2010 site collections would run in classic SP2010 mode, not 2013, until you upgrade? And if you upgrade, won’t you have to move to the app model and get off the sharepoint server to host your own solution? But if you decide not to upgrade, SP2010 Designer with its Design View will work just fine.
What am I missing?
this is a real kicker and will really slow down development and make many SMEs rethink if SharePoint is a supportable and viable solution for them to manage and implement effectively.
Thanks Asif for explaining the problem so clearly – As a non programmer I have been relying on the design view to develop SharePoint applications since 1999 way back in the days of Frontpage! This functionality was central to my taking up SharePoint in the first place – who on earth uses code view when you can drag and drop!! This is a seriously retrograde step. It has taken MS 14 years to work out that SP is an application development platform and at the same time they deprecate a core “no code” element of that capability. Their HTML 5 and CSS arguments are a cop out – they should rewrite the design view code so that it does support this new technology – and do it fast!
@Brian – The main thing is that ‘Power Users’ won’t be able to do what they have been able to do until now. They are the ones affected the most because they can’t go out and just build an App for managing their Data Views. Otherwise, I agree that the App model is a very exciting new window for developers to code their solution and make money doing it. Kudos to Microsoft for bringing that to SharePoint.
@Chris and @Stephen – agree with both of your sentiments.
Only time will tell how the SharePoint power users community reacts to it when they have to go through the upgrade without this functionality.
I’m a developer and can write code with my eyes shut, but I often used Designer to do the simple things. Adjusting widths in grid cells, conditionally formatting data. It was much easier clicking on a part in Design view and be taken to the right part of the code.
I can’t believe that MSFT did this. It just seems so backwards. Most developers I know enjoy a nice rich visual interface.
Thanks for the visuals. I can understand MS’s reasoning to some point, but this change is going to affect a lot of companies/organizations and how they use, design, and develop SP sites. I would imagine that quite a few companies/organizations that were thinking of upgrading to SP 2013 will now hold off as long as they can.
@Faye – It is a drastic change for sure. SharePoint Conference is coming up soon so I’m interested in seeing how people react to this change..
@David – I here you. Developer or Power User, we all use this functionality one time or another. It’s going to much more difficult to do that now
Hi,
Thanks Asif for greate visual explanation.
I want the checklist of what are all the functionalities(workflows,branding etc) developed using SPD 2010 can be upgrade to SP2013 as it is.
Thanks in advance
I understand the descision, but they can’t just cut us off without offering a workable option.Expect to see some 3rd party fill this very important need. If not a big hesitation to move forward for a while.
But, I still think must be missing something here..
I’ve opened SPO Preview site with SPD 2013. Created a new webpart page and am trying to insert a custom list in new mode. I’ve also tried to insert a web part. I just get the guitar error beep but no clear error message. I’m able to add text and insert asp.net controls, just no SP controls??
I don’t see the DataView Web Part anywhere in SPD 2013?
I also have VS 2012 wth the SP 2013 Dev add-on. I am able to modify NAPA projects, but can’t seem to open SPO Preview sites. It just says Forbidden. I am able to open a specific aspx file in vs 2012 but don’t see a way to turn it into custom this way.
I’m hoping somebody produces a how to guide on how to create a customized custom list newform and Data View with SPD 2013 alone.
I see an option to customize the form with infoPath, but I refuse to work in InfoPath – I want to work with html forms.
If MS is going this way, they should at least offer a way to create custom Custom List HTML forms in whatever mode we want on Web Part pages from SPO directly and allow to tweak the html/xslt and add jQuery blocks in the same interface. Same deal with List and Data Views then we don’t even need to leave the cloud.
This does not feel like easier development and open progress to me. Feels like we will need an army of .NET developers to move our working customizations.
This is really a big problem MS has created for admins like me , who has very less knowledge about coding. I hope MS will release an update to address this issue.
For the record: Design View is not coming back unfortunately.
The removal of the built in design view may seem significant but it really isn’t. If you want to locate the tag or tags you wish to work with and their related css most people are likely already using F12 in their browser to pull up the tool feature which allows them to identify elements, their properties and styling characteristics via pick and click. This seems far more useful than the SPD tool ever had. Now maybe, I’m wrong and misguided so feel free to enlighten me, I just think this is a case of where we were all accustom to seeing it there and probably looked at split view most of the time without any real benefit from it. Who of us ever depended solely on the SPD design view more often than than the F12 dev tool available in you browser of choice these days?
Yea, MS now encouraging us to use Dreamweaver if you wanna view SharePoint pages in design view.
Shahzeb: Dreamweaver does not show what SPD used to show. Very different things. This is not a replacement.
Degas: You are talking about a different audience. My reference is to Power User audience who doesn’t understand (and doesn’t want to dabble into) Code View.
This is a very big change for lower-level users who would be able to modify basic formatting and layout in data view parts without being a developer. I am a software trainer/consultant and in many cases, line of business people who have basic IT skills want to be able to add some conditional formatting or maybe a new item form onto a page and through some simple steps could do it entirely in Design View. This meant that their company could affect changes they wanted with only a minimal investment in some training rather than spending large amounts of cash on contracting a developer or sending their IT folks to extensive web developer training. The folks who will really benefit from this are skilled developers since their demand will skyrocket. I have been in this business since the 90s and its just amazing to see a company just completly remove a level of capability from their product.
Great post. Not surprised although disappointed. I’ve seen the writing on the wall about moving to a developer’s platform instead of an end-user configurable platform for a while now.
Whenever I’ve talked to Microsoft about missing core capabilities of their platform (for example, the completely bizarre move to split Blogs and Comments off from their core Content Publishing templates), their response has always been “Oh, that’s easy, just get a developer to write X, Y, and Z.”
But perhaps …
… we don’t /want/ to spend $20,000 to recreate functionality that exists inside an arbitrary silo?
… we don’t /want/ to have custom code requiring maintenance and updates?
… we don’t /want/ to have our users constantly needing our help to implement trivial enhancements?
They have always been tone deaf about the fact that the advantage of COTS is NO CODE. I suppose it comes from working inside a coder’s culture…
This is a major deal, and unfortunately one I wasn’t as prepared for as I would like to have been. Been working on getting a SharePoint 2013 portal up and configured for a couple weeks. Things that I used to do easily in SharePoint 2010 require a lot more work. For instance, the company I’m doing this for has a guide from their marketing group on the corporate colors. So now I’m supposed to know / understand how changing “75736D” to “FFBBEE” for the “SubtleEmphasisText” tag in the Pallette008.spcolor file in \_catalogs\theme\15 is supposed to change the look of the website? Seriously?
I used to tell my SharePoint customers that branding was harder to get over people’s preferences than to implement. Now I’m more likely to just say “Pick one of the themes Microsoft gives you and live with it.”
[...] http://blog.sharepoint-videos.com/sharepoint-designer-2013-data-view-web-part-list-view-web-part-des… [...]
I’m so glad to see this article – if only to confirm my worst fears! Now I am really bummed out to see my last 5 years of sharepoint knowledge go down the job market hill.
I’m a power user, designer, and site collections administrator, and I definitely stay away from code as much as possible. With this change, I may fall off the “support sharepoint” wagon for our organization. Businesses just don’t have much money to spend on developers – and at least in the past, Sharepoint development could go to power users for basic, easy customization, and to developers for more sophisticated development. Most users do not use sharepoint out of the box, because it does not have great usability without customization. Visual appeal is a very strong factor in whether sharepoint strategies succeed or not. Who thinks that companies are going to spend money on a consultant to make a column look visually “nice”? That said, I don’t think MS will keep its market share of users if it becomes another program that “only developers” can understand and customize. I don’t actually know too many users who LOVE sharepoint! I like it, because of the capabilities it has NOW in SP 2010. However, I’m not sure if it would be in my best interest to become a programmer just to support Sharepoint, as there are other technologies out there that are just as good or better. Google is starting to reach into the collaboration market – so perhaps that’s where the power users like me will go. That, or drupal.
Awful decision. Rethinking any recommendation to take company to Sharepoint 2013.
Uggg! So let me get this straight… my house doesn’t have a skylight, and it’s the standard to have skylights, so burn down the house?! And I spend more time at work more then at home… so it’s ok to burn it down because of that too? Blah… this doesn’t make since.
Hi All.
Like many others have expressed here, this is a game changer for me too.
I had been a coder in the world of classic ASP but got fully immersed in SP over the past 9 years. I have been working with companies to help the optimize what had been fabulously powerful features of SP2007 and SP2010, particularly the DVWP and custom workflow. The big ROI for all of these many, many businesses was the fact that they did NOT need to invest huge $$$$ in .NET development, code maintenance, upgrade factors, etc., but still got powerful application solutions and SPD was the driving force behind all of that.
My recommendation to my customers and all business I work with will be to avoid SP2013 at all costs. I have a few SMBs who bought into Office 365 and who had robust SP sites through their subscription. One has been upgraded to SP2013, and working with their very complex DVWPs (conditional formatting and other special features) and workflow is now a nightmare. Now my costs for working on their project has skyrocketed and they are not happy. I am trying to find a way to move them from Office 365 to some other hosted platform (any suggestions?).
And another thing… having been an early web developer I remember the days when all we had were code editors like Word Pad, and I remember how we were all thrilled when development studios were introduced and these IDEs have become the standard. I ask, what developer, of any kind, anywhere is using a IDE that DOES NOT have a visual option???
I am now looking for alternatives to SP for my business and my customers. Like Stephen Bonds mentions above, I was touting the virtues of SP as a COTS product to my customers for the power of its no-code solutions and OOB features. So much for that!
Microsoft has now virtually eliminated the “power user” and thrust all of that back onto IT and developers! Nice work once again, Microsoft!
This is much more serious than “no skylight”. This is more like for the last 6 years we’ve been buying homes that already had walls and ceilings and all we had to do was paint and move in. Now the new homes have no walls or ceilings and we have to build these ourselves. Problem is not all of us are contractors.
I’ve got dozens of no code designs, dataviews, and custom forms that I can no longer support becaue they were upgraded to sharepoint 2013 in O365. This presents a nightmare scenerio for me.
Does Microsoft think about their customers or just make decisions they feel is ok for them. They need to learn from other technology companies whose product are built on customer’s advise and need.