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:
https://www.visualsp.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: https://www.visualsp.com/about/
A Web Designer tool … without Design mode view!
Sharepoint 2013 is the most complicate websrv to manage!
For admin: Don’t use Central Admin they doesn’t work (a lot of bugs)!
… You must use Power Shell.
And now for Designer … use Visual Studio for code and view!
Also, InfoPath is doesn’t support anymore…
Now… give me just one reason to continue to use Sharepoint? … really!
I tried this on an External Content Type of which I set up a read-only list (only created read list and read item operations), but when I edit the list view in SPD 2013, right-click on the tag to get its properties, the pop-up window reports Error occurred.
I’ve also tried getting at the options tab by deleting the web part, and re-adding it to the page. When I insert a newly added web part, the Options tab shows up, as long as I’m actively editing that page. If I close the page, or close SPD, and re-open the page, I’m stuck again without the options ribbon, and again get an error.
The error is non-specific.
Other details:
Environment: SharePoint Online (Office 365)
Back End Database: Microsoft Azure SQL Database
Objective: Use existing SharePoint Online licensing to perform basic reporting on data collected into an Azure SQL database used for mobile applications
Johnny Manley or anyone else, did you figure out how to load the master pages for editing in another html editor? This is what we’re supposed to be able to do right? Is their any documentation on this method?
I was searching some some help on locating the Design Window thinking it must have been moved in SP 2013 Designer and came across this blog. Now I don’t have time to go into coding and find the places where I want to alter on a page. I work for a big company and now I would not recommend colleagues to move their sites from our SP2010 to SP2013 that the company has installed. For 2 years by the look of this people have voiced a strong opinion. I hope MS would look at it again and save everyone’s time.
It just occurred to me, being at your session at the MVP summit… (great session by the way)
You guys should take a look at our data view plus web part, to replace your existing data view web parts.
No xsl, so you just build and design the HTML with your favourite HTML editing tool (you can use anything that produces HTML, even MS Word), then just take the HTML and make it into a template.
Would love to hear what you think.
(hope you don’t mind the back link to my blog)
http://kwizcom.blogspot.ca/2014/10/the-power-of-data-view-plus-web-part.html
Have you seen Dustin Miller’s Magic Data View Builder web part? It’s not a replacement for design view, but at least it provides some UI support for creating data view web parts.
http://blog.sharepointexperience.com/2012/03/introducing-the-magic-data-view-builder/
Thanks Eugene. True that this free magic data view builder is an option (though not supported by MS)
I posted a comment to show my frustration on here. You don’t show it can. Can you explain your decision please ?
Hi Asif, I just subscribed to the SharePoint-Videos just recently and the only reason I subscribed was because of your Data View Connectivity to other DBs . I’m not a HTML coder. Not sure what I’ll do now. I have SharePoint Designer 2013.
Josephine, my suggestion would be to look into Search web parts. And if that’s not an option, then there are third party companies (such as Lightning Tools) which have started making Data View web part type tools. You might want to look into that.
Don, I’m not a Microsoft employee… never was. I was just as frustrated once I first found out about this decision.
However, it is what it now and we have to look for alternatives. I don’t believe there is any chance of it coming back.
I can understand the visual part going away for whatever the lame reason MSFT has given, but how can this explain for not providing the bread crumbs at the status bar that could have shown the hierarchy of elements within a page. There is a similar functionality in VS (heck even in IE developer tool pane) that could have let us select elements and sections of the markup.
Thats seems malicious perhaps sadistic. Probably MSFT is up for creating a room for the third party SharePoint tool developer. No doubt that SP2013 has turned into amazing enterprise wide platform but for Developers its turning in to a nightmare.
I am very disappointed with Microsoft. I used design view for many things, one being conditional formatting. How am I supposed to do that in the code? If there is a third party tool out there that can do this, I’d buy it! Microsoft has made it very difficult for many companies to work with SharePoint now.
What a stupid business decision on Microsoft’s part – they have taken away the very feature that made SharePoint the kind of tool businesses could use for solutions that they could not get from their IT. What a loss! and what short sighted decision that was on Microsoft’s part. talk about ruining a good thing!
I just move from SP 2010 to 2013. This has to be the worst thing they have done for development.
And that shameful plug from Kwicom…come on buddy..
Isn’t the product called SharePoint “Designer”? What a poor excuse for removing the only feature that made SharePoint actually usable. Thanks Obama!
I cannot believe they would remove that function. Creating conditional formatting was one of the major reasons I turned to SharePoint Designer (besides workflows.)
Removing it has made this so much more difficult that it ought to be. Sure I can do it but I have to poke around a lot more. Makes “No Code” solutions for conditional formatting a thing of the past. Microsoft claims that you can use other web tools, but not to build the conditional formatting.
Just ridiculous. I hope someone can come up with a fix for this, or better yet Microsoft wakes up and adds it back in.
this change is a HUGE negative. I will no longer be able to do a lot of things easily now that 2010 allowed me to do – takes so much more time to do stuff straight in the code.
make my job harder….thanks.
Yes, its very difficult to design the UI without design interface
Wow, I’m obviously late to the party, but I agree…this sucks. I’m not even doing anything fancy…just want to selectively drop a bunch of data into an existing list. Guess I’ll turn to Powershell / CSOM / REST. What a mess.
The functionality of Lotus Notes is now 4 decades ahead of SharePoint. All kidding aside, after using Notes for 25 years I wish I could have a code regression.
I built a couple company intranets using SP2010 with designer. Now we want to go to 2013 and without a design view I basically can’t do my job – it takes 10 times as long to do with code what you can do with the design view and not as cleanly. No one else here has enough specific coding experience to do it now either because, as we all know, it’s not just code, it’s Microsoft code.
It was a tunnelvision decision. While many like me used to champion sharepoint, it is basically now unusable and I’ve already recommended and implemented a different solution from sharepoint in another company because SP cannot be maintained except by trained code monkeys now, most of whom know NOTHING about biotech or how the data makes sense to arrange when designing sites etc, forcing you to hire people for no other purpose.
Great job.
Really unfortunate. I’m fairly new and thought I just solved the issue to load and existing list on another page. The instructions used design view. Thanks for those 2 hours lost.
ok, but has anyone found a WYSIWYG editor for SharePoint Online? I just want to create an HTML report that pulls data from 5 lists that is formatted for printing. It’s not the end of the world, but like the others pointed out I’m not a coder and we can’t afford one…..
I stumbled across this while trying to figure out a GUI way to do something as simple as modify a table width. I can’t believe Design View was removed! I figured SharePoint Designer HAD to have a way to do this more cleanly than manually modifying the code directly. I’ve resigned myself to pulling the table into Excel, modifying it there, and pasting it page on to the page with subtle tweaks. I don’t think that’s how this is supposed to work…
The decisions MS makes, boggles the mind.Even worse are the ridiculous excuses they make: “code view is more widely used than design view”. Do they really expect anyone to believe that? I would think that anyone who is just coding, is probably using Visual Studio anyway.
I find that each time MS releases a new version of their software, I am far more affected by the features they’ve removed, than any new ones that have been added. The worst part is that they don’t care, and they can afford not to care.
Has anyone found a WYSIWYG Editor for SharePoint Online? Specifically I am trying to replicate the creation of aspx reports we once build in SP 2010, but without the editor I might as well fling poo against the wall. The options for dumping the data to Access and Excel are ok…….just take forever and doesn’t produce the results I want 100% of the time.