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SharePoint Designer (discontinued)

SharePoint Designer (discontinued)

Overview

What is SharePoint Designer (discontinued)?

Microsoft's SharePoint Designer was a tool for developing SharePoint applications that has been discontinued.

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Recent Reviews

Outdated

2 out of 10
August 30, 2021
Incentivized
I occasionally use it on old sites because they're harder to manage than modern pages. It's my last resort when I can't find something on …
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Awards

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Pricing

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What is SharePoint Designer (discontinued)?

Microsoft's SharePoint Designer was a tool for developing SharePoint applications that has been discontinued.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

What is SharePoint Designer (discontinued)?

SharePoint Designer (discontinued) Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(65)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-16 of 16)
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August 30, 2021

Outdated

Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
To me, it's the most helpful on Classic sites, which is what it was designed to design. Modern pages are easier to edit and audit, so it really isn't any help. I can't see any point in recommending an obsolete product to a colleague that hasn't used it, unless they are needing to find, document, or replace old sites and workflows.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SharePoint does not provide, out of the box, a tool to create / update workflows from web. You have to use SharePoint Designer in order to create them.
If you need to implement custom workflows for specific business processes, then SharePoint Designer is well suited.
SharePoint Designer allows you to create workflows with task approval, email notifications, assign variables and update SharePoint Lists / Documents properties.

In our company, we have created specific workflows for :
- Purchase order
- RH forms validation like annual employee review
- Dematerialized existing forms and validation
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We don't recommend companies use [SharePoint Designer] for new work at this time. It is being phased out by Microsoft and replaced by new tools in SharePoint Online such as Power Automate. If you do have old SharePoint farms you can use it, but again, I would not recommend using it to create new workflows.
July 21, 2021

Decent product

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Well suited for simple workflows and easy conversion of lookup fields to text. Not well suited for complex workflows. Not well suited for cross-site lookups. The issue I am facing is that we have a list of all shop locations. The list lives on the root site of one of our 3 site collections and has many details about each shop. There is also managed metadata with just the shop location name to be used as a lookup field in many lists in all three site collections. This can't be accomplished in SharePoint Designer.
Krishn Garg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SharePoint Designer is well suited to develop custom workflow solution and deploy on SharePoint sites. It is also used to customize site master pages and template modification along with custom search.

It is not suited for designing site pages and for developing highly customized solutions, as it will crash.
September 11, 2019

SharePoint Designer Novice

Doreen Giles | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SharePoint Designer is good if you want to do a custom page design—editing the master page in SharePoint. I have never done this. I like to use SharePoint Designer for moving pages around within a site. It is not as easy if you want to move pages between sites. If I am looking to edit HTML or apps, I am able to track down code through the SharePoint Designer interface. It is useful for locating all the files that make up pages. It is not my go-to for design because I would rather use an interface where it is WYSIWYG and not bounce from one screen to a browser to view the results of changes made.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SharePoint Designer is a great HTML web page designer that allows customization of master pages, page layouts, CSS, and JavaScript. SharePoint Designer can also add KPI elements to your List Views through the creation of Conditional Formatting (i.e. having the font display in Red for any overdue tasks). It can also create a web part connection that allowed you to connect web parts across pages, like the ability to create a connection that allowed you to select an item in a list on one page and open another page to view data that was associated with the selected item.

If you opt to use SharePoint Designer, latest version 2013 for SharePoint Online or on-premise, here is what you can do with a SharePoint list: Custom list, Permissions, Columns, Views, Forms, Content Type and set Custom Actions.
Matt Finley, MSIT | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SharePoint designer is good for building out of the box SharePoint workflows. It is also good for managing site content and site lists and libraries. It can also be used as a source code editor for front end development. SharePoint designer is not appropriate for full stack SharePoint development. Does not have the capabilities that Visual Studio offers for developing SharePoint sites.
Nicholas Miller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Well Suited - WORKFLOWS!
To a SharePoint Developer, workflows are like a hammer to a carpenter. If there is a business process that needs automation, the first thing I look to is what are we automating? What/where is the data? How can we minimize the number of keystrokes by end-users to get from the start to finish? The answer to all of these is "build a workflow". With the introduction of "Call HTTP Web Service" action, you can now access data anywhere in a site collection and consume it in any site, on any list, for any form. SharePoint Designer Workflows makes the SharePoint world go round.

Less Appropriate - Building SharePoint Pages
I have attempted to use SharePoint Designer to build custom pages, but it just is the worst tool to use. There are many other tools to use to develop customized pages. The techniques of designing custom page layouts, CSS files to populate in pages, JavaScript Snippets for pages have changed so much over the years, and SharePoint Designer did not change with them. In fact, it is my opinion the 2013 version made it 100 times more difficult than the 2010 Version.
April Dunnam | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I would say that most developers such as myself are not big fans of SharePoint Designer. With that said, there are a couple things that you can't deny it is still well suited for. The biggest is workflow development. Microsoft is pushing Flow as a workflow tool more and more but it still has a way to go and is only available on O365. So, for workflow development, SharePoint Designer is your first stop. It is actually pretty end user friendly for developing workflows. The other thing it's well suited for it uploading resource files. Rather than mapping a drive to upload files, you can easily open it up in Designer and copy and paste.

Lorraine Marrero | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SharePoint Designer is very well suited for designing/modifying workflows. It is very easy to use for this purpose. I also find it easy to create page layouts and display templates, which if used together with search queries and content queries, can take the place of having to create web parts.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I would have to say no. Most out of the box functionality can be done in SharePoint Designer as well as within SharePoint. I think it's okay to use both if you have the permissions to do so. If you aren't a power users or developer I would recommend not using SharePoint Designer because you could easily make modifications that weren't intended.
Kristina Geiger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is very well-suited and efficient for workflows, item/page views (as long as you aren't afraid of and are well-versed in the page code), and ease of creation for pages/sites/etc. If you need something extremely customizable with the least amount of limitations, you may be better off creating a custom solution in Visual Studios, but if your solution needs to go a bit larger than standard out-of-box functionality, SharePoint Designer would be a good tool to use.
Mary Kay Scott | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

Designer 2010 is a huge improvement over Designer 2007. I'm just now installing Designer 2013 for my next upgrade environment, and I hope it is similarly improved. Given that there aren't any easy alternatives to Designer, it is worth putting up with its idiosyncrasies in order to get quick results for my end users.

But it is a powerful tool, so I will not make it available to the various power users who have requested access to it in production. We can restrict what site(s) Designer users can change, but within those sites, everything becomes up for grabs. Since my company wants to (a) maintain consistent user interfaces, and (b) restrict the number of unghosted pages overall (for performance reasons), we opt to let users from outside my team create their designs/customizations/workflows in the test environment, then we vet them before moving them to production.

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