Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Bible

Examining Key Features

In this section, we dive into the tools and features of SharePoint Designer that enable you to customize the look and feel of your SharePoint sites. You may want to apply your company branding and other customizations to different areas of your sites to make it easy for employees to differentiate one department area from another. After you become familiar with these features, you can do the basic customizations detailed later in the chapter.

Automatic CSS style generation

As you customize pages in SharePoint designer, styles are automatically created to reflect your changes to content. After you have customized a specific item, such as a table or area, you can easily apply that same customization to other areas without redoing all of your work. This is accomplished using the following tools:

• Apply Styles task pane

• CSS Properties Grid

• New Style Dialog

• Code View Improvements (code hyperlinks while you are in code view)

No Code Read/Write Data View Web Part & Forms

Although the Data View Web Part is not new to SharePoint, there are some notable improvements that make adding data from dynamic data sources even easier and more powerful.

• Write support

• Related/linked data sources

• Visual Web Developer ASP.NET 2.0 Style UI

• XPath tools

• Create Data View

• Insert a formula column

• Add conditional formatting

• Turn on editing mode

• Bonus: Insert Data View as a form

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 no-code features means that solution creators need not be solution developers. You can ...