Welcome to the SharePoint Designer Team Blog!

Hello and welcome,

We are very excited to launch this SharePoint Designer Team Blog as one of our primary channels for interacting with the SharePoint community. SharePoint Designer, released just about two months ago (go here for the official product page), is a new product based on FrontPage and Visual Studio technologies and allows you to customize SharePoint sites, design the layout of a SharePoint page, create no-code workflows, and build sophisticated composite applications on top of the SharePoint platform. SharePoint Designer fulfills important tasks in the SharePoint universe and will become the de facto companion tool for IT pros and advanced users and even some developers when it comes to working with SharePoint sites.

Now that I have introduced the star of the show, I would like you to meet the supporting cast of contributors to this blog. Initially, there will be two contributors as folllows, but since this is indeed a team blog, others will undoubted chime in over time:

• Jerome Thiebaud (myself) : I am the Product Manager in charge of all marketing efforts for SharePoint Designer, and I had spent the past two years preparing for the launch of this great product. My goal for this blog is to provide you with some perspectives and guidance on core usage scenarios, positioning of the product, integration with other Microsoft products, customer evidence, and additional resources to make the best use of SharePoint Designer.
• Rob Mauceri: Rob is the Principal Program Manager for SharePoint Designer and has a unique background in that he was part of the original FrontPage team before it was acquired by Microsoft way back when. He has been part of every single release of FrontPage and has now embarked on the SharePoint Designer adventure. His goal is to share plenty of nuggets of useful technical information with you via this blog.

The combination of marketing and technical expertise should provide some interesting content with enough technical depth to satisfy your appetite. The ultimate goal of this blog is to initiate a dialog with the community of users, designers, IT pros and developers interested in SharePoint Designer and to provide a unique perspective from directly inside the product group. We plan to provide training resources, tips and tricks, and how-to’s that will help you to fully leverage the power and flexibility of SharePoint Designer. In return, we would love to get your feedback on the shortcomings of our product or product documentation and your feature ideas for future releases of SharePoint Designer.

Jerome Thiebaud, Senior Product Manager
Office SharePoint Designer

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 22, 2007
  Connaissez-vous SharePoint Designer 2007 ? Comme son nom l'indique, c'est l'outil de création par excellence

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2007
  most excellent!  look forward to hearing all you folks have to share about SPD!

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2007
  I am having trouble getting a product key to activate my trial copy of SD07. I've downloaded the file, but when I follow the links to get the key I end up at a blank screen. I start out here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/bb188203.aspx Then click on Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Then I pick my language and thats usually when I encounter a blank screen. Twice I was presented with a login, and once I even filled out a form about what I will be doing with it, but I always end up with a blank screen.

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2007
  Looking forward to watching this blog mature! Glad to see you guys blogging! /Shane

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2007
  Welcome to the community. Looking forward seeing a lot of SPD related tips and articles, as well as upcoming hotfixes (hint hint)

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2007
  I will second the trial key problems. Half the time you can't even get through the logon/billing confirmation section but even then I have only receieved the welcom email that tells me to "click here to get the trial key" which takes me back to the same process. Still no key.

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2007
  looking forward! is there a way to get an RSS subscription only for this blog and not for all msdn blogs?

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2007
  Mike, the RSS feed for this blog is http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/rss.xml.

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2007
  Forgive me for my previous post... wasn't completly awake yet I guess :)

• Anonymous
  January 24, 2007
  Thank you guys for beginning the blog. I am sure, that many people will agree, that it would be just worderful if your next blog entry would describe the process of creating a non-simple workflow in Sharepoint designer. I am not working with Sharepoint Designer + Sharepoint services v3 and I just can't create an APPROVAL workflow for a document library, could you please post a smaple of everything that should be done to have this workflow done Regards, Roman

• Anonymous
  January 24, 2007
  Thank you for the initial welcome....The product team really appreciates. I will be working on the SharePoint Designer download issues right away. For the workflow, we have a number of documents already posted and I will address it in an upcoming post.

• Anonymous
  January 25, 2007
  Where are these workflow documents posted at?  Can you make a link from here so they are easy to get? Do you have one that shows how to do a Change Workflow that compares the orginal value to the new changed value?

• Anonymous
  January 25, 2007
  As someone who has called FrontPage and now SharePoint Designer my "development" tool of choice over the years I am stoked to see this site up. Looking forward to your postings and referring my own readers here.

• Anonymous
  January 26, 2007
  Hey guys Welcome to the world of blogging.  Will definitely look here for tips and updates to SharePoint Designer.

• Anonymous
  January 26, 2007
  Have installed SharePoint Designer 2007 on two different machines. All I have seen it do is crash persistently. When will we have a stable version of this tool.

• Anonymous
  January 26, 2007
  I am attempting to create a new look for my company's SharePoint site, and am having some difficulties.  I have downloaded the Designer demo to determine if it suits our needs, and I have to say that demo with a limited number of loads should not crash as often as Designer has.  That aside, the biggest hurdle I am facing involves unique site content, such as webparts.  While aspx sites look appropriate when opened in Designer, the content is out of place when the site is opened in IE, and quicklaunch links claim there is no content.  I have reviewed the asp content tags numerous times, and am so far unable to determine what might be causing this dysfunction.  Does anyone have any insights?

• Anonymous
  February 05, 2007
  I am running SPD final on a fresh WinXp SP2 system and Office 2007.  I have not been able to do much either as Anthony G. said.  I try to convert a list to XSLT, crash, I try to play with DataSheet view  in IE7, get teh dread Datasheet view activeX not installed error. (and yes I ma running full office entrprise so I do have the activex installed.) When will these issues be fixed.  Wherre can I get support?  Really tough to get user buy in  when you can't do anything they ask you to do, because of errors, bugs and crashing apps. Looking forward to using SP & MOSS 2007.....when it's ready.

• Anonymous
  March 20, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 16, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 02, 2007
  I am running SharePoint Designer on Vista and the IDE is very quirky.  Today for instance, I cannot check my work out - the Folder List is indicating that the files that I checked in yesterday are still checked out - they are not.  I tried closing Designer - no change.  I had someone else check out the files and check them back in and I still can't check them out.  Is anybody aware of a work-around?

• Anonymous
  July 17, 2007
  Been using SPD for about 2 months now in a corporate intranet environment.  It's certainly a tool with an extensive feature set and allows you to fully customise WSS3 sites, but unfortunately it's been so unstable (tried running it on Vista Business and XP and W2K3 Standard) that I can't honestly say I'll be able to suggest it in it's current version as a viable development tool for other clients of mine needing WSS3 customisations.  It's been a learning experience and I've probably lost about 2 weeks of development time because of it (being a one man business...). I'm not in to knocking MS at all as I depend on what's offered to make a living, and I rate most of it highly (especially WSS3 being a free framework).  In my opinion SPD is not yet suitable to be used as a production dev tool yet, purely for the amount of downtime I've experienced.  And also the fact that performance over a 1Gb network is pretty slow...  As I said great feature set though. Looking forward to further updates...

• Anonymous
  August 01, 2007
  Hi , I had a new Instln of SP2007 . I downloaded a trial version of SP Designer.Unfortunately I ended up with the same situation as the above ladies and gentlemen on trying to get a Product Activation Key.Can any one send tell me or send me the Trial Activation Key on my email id: skvc_2000@yahoo.co.in

• Anonymous
  August 02, 2007
  been using sharepoint designer for a while designing our comapny internet and everything went rather well. Until now. I'm now working on the intranet and it's a whole different story. I've bult the collaboration portal and when I want to create a list in datasheet view an allitemsg.aspx is created and since I ahve our own master page I attach it and I get a master page error and I go to fix it, just like I've been doing for months now and SPD just crashes, no explanation. It works fine with every view I create as long as it's not a data sheet view. Any thoughts?

• Anonymous
  August 10, 2007
  I have same problem with the Trial Key, I follow the instructions, get asked to log in and then I get and error message.

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2007
  Found this blog post via Google search. I'd like to pile on and say that SPD is barely useable for me as well. It crashes without fail every time I use it. I've been using it both in XP and in Win2K3.

• Anonymous
  August 29, 2007
  I'd like to chime in and echo Michael A. Vickers' comments. I've been using SPD almost all year...well, trying to. It crashes every time I use it. Over the 7-8 months that I tried to use product, I estimate I lost 2+ weeks of productivity from the constant crashes and hangs. As a result, I have stopped using it completely. I now use Visual Studio to do all page layout editing, after opening the layouts using MOSS's Explorer view. Visual Studio doesn't have all the features of SPD, but at least it doesn't crash. DO NOT bother with SPD. It is a complete waste of time.

• Anonymous
  September 04, 2007
  I have SPD 2007 running on my Vista Desktop and my Win XP SP2 Laptop, and I must also chime in that SPD 2007 crashes quite frequently in both environments.  I'm running WSS 3.0 off of a Shared SharePoint Services hosting site.

• Anonymous
  September 06, 2007
  I'd also like to chime in on saying that the trial download doesn't appear to working properly still, just ends up resulting in: Sorry, we were unable to retrive your product key(s) at this time. Please Try again later. Error Code: 1045 Any information regarding how to actually download a trial key to go with my trial download would be much appreciated, not sure how I can review this product otherwise!

• Anonymous
  October 04, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 19, 2007
  3:58pm ID: 7, Application Name: Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, Application Version: 12.0.4518.1014, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.4518.1014. This session lasted 20281 seconds with 5400 seconds of active time.  This session ended with a crash. 4:22pm ID: 7, Application Name: Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, Application Version: 12.0.4518.1014, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.4518.1014. This session lasted 1274 seconds with 60 seconds of active time.  This session ended with a crash. 4:23pm ID: 7, Application Name: Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, Application Version: 12.0.4518.1014, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.4518.1014. This session lasted 29 seconds with 0 seconds of active time.  This session ended with a crash. 4:25pm ID: 7, Application Name: Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, Application Version: 12.0.4518.1014, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.4518.1014. This session lasted 99 seconds with 60 seconds of active time.  This session ended with a crash. 4:28pm ID: 7, Application Name: Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, Application Version: 12.0.4518.1014, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.4518.1014. This session lasted 145 seconds with 0 seconds of active time.  This session ended with a crash. REBOOT 4:38pm ID: 7, Application Name: Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, Application Version: 12.0.4518.1014, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.4518.1014. This session lasted 95 seconds with 60 seconds of active time.  This session ended with a crash. 4:40pm ID: 7, Application Name: Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, Application Version: 12.0.4518.1014, Microsoft Office Version: 12.0.4518.1014. This session lasted 35 seconds with 0 seconds of active time.  This session ended with a crash. etc.....

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 27, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 27, 2007
  And I've been told by a number of friends that someone is removing posts that say anything negative about the direction of Microsoft, of which a piece of evidence are the comments on this blog. Would that the people spending the time preventing constructive criticism being raised on this blog spend the time instead actually doing something...

• Anonymous
  November 27, 2007
  Hi Alan, I understand your frustration. I will say that I think we've been pretty good at replying to comments posted specifically to our blog posts (I look through and see Jon C replies well to his comments, for example), but you are correct that we have not been good at looking at general comments to the blog itself. I am going to try to change that. I keep almost making excuses for our lack of comments in this specific post, but I'm going to try to resist. As far as the crashes go commented above, we actively scrub the database of callstacks and watson data to try to fix the most common crashes our customers experience. Typically crashes like we see above are caused by specific controls emitting some code our design surface does not expect. The reason some people see them a lot and some never is typically because people use different controls in their pages (for example, we tried to equivalency class asp.net controls in general, but if you have a custom control, it is possible the design-time HTML contains something we never tested - which is unfortunate) . In addition, the version of the framework can be important. Getting repros for the crashes can be difficult, but as long as people send their crash data, we should see them. For an admittedly poor workaround at present, I'd recommend trying to create a new page from scratch and seeing if as you add controls, one specific control keeps causing you to crash. To Alan's specific comment about supporting the product. We expect this blog to be a way to engage in a conversation with you (though as I've said we have not been great at that recently), and offer tips, help topics, general goings-on, but we can't debug and support each post that comes in. Believe me, I'd like to - I used to work in product support and know how painful some issues can be - but it just isn't possible. I would love it if you posted steps I could use here to get a crash so we could debug it, but general statements like "I open a page and crash" are really difficult to respond to and impossible to debug. I sincerely hope you find us getting better at this... -John Jansen SharePoint Designer Test Lead

• Anonymous
  November 28, 2007
  Andy H: Indeed, Scott Guthrie is incredibly smart, eloquent and passionate. I'm not sure who told you we remove posts that say anything negative about the direction of Microsoft, because we don't. I'd like to try to understand better your issue with the SPD Trial and what it specifically means when you say you have tested it on different OS's all with the same result. What is that result? In other words, does setup finish but then launching the app fails? Or does setup fail with an error code? -John

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2007
  The instability of Sharepoint Designer is unequaled by any microsoft product, not only does it lack any proper error reporting to find out what is causing the issues, but the issues at hand have been around since the very first release and no updates are to be found anywhere... spdblog shouldn't be apologising for the replies to this blog, but for the lack of any updates, fixes or more thourough error reporting so maybe we could help ourselves (since i don't expect anything at all from MS) SPDBLOG wrote: "but general statements like "I open a page and crash" are really difficult to respond to and impossible to debug." frankly, i would agree with you but in this case I don't, because it's really random behaviour... i can open a masterpage and it crashes abrubtly, without any notice of the origin of the problem. I restart SPD and can open the same masterpage without problems. Work on it  a little, save & publish and then start working on the second - an yes, it crashes again upon opening the file. I have these issues with Masterpages, Page layouts and copies of XSLT files (probably even more but these are the only files i've been modifying. Of course you can't reproduce these errors... not without the files we're working on and the moss database behind everything. But are any efforts done to look into the files / data combinations that result in this behaviour? I'm getting an average of about 15 crashes / 3 hours on my Vista / Office2007 combo ... This makes it impossible for me to work on anything... SPDBLOG wrote: "I sincerely hope you find us getting better at this..." I hope so too - and despair that we wont have to wait another year for the needed fixes & updates.

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2007
  Hey Rik, Clearly there is an issue that needs to be addressed here. We are making an effort to repro issues as they are reported through Watson, but we are just missing some pivotal information in some cases. For example, I own a few different sites hosted on different ISPs and I edit them all the time using SPD on Vista and I have yet to crash. What we are able to do as a product group for some crashes is take the callstack, and determine what state is causing the crash to prevent that final result from happening. Unfortunately, in those cases we can't say why the pointer was null (or whatever the problem was), we can only account for the pointer being null. In other words, we can't prevent that state from being reached because we may not be sure how you reached it, but we can be more robust in how we handle that state. I hope that makes sense. Typically the MOSS backend won't really affect this design-view crash, so that part should not need to enter into the equation. Would you be willing to share your master page with me? I'd love it if I could get a copy, open it in SPD and get a consistent set of steps to cause a callstack to be generated. If so, send it to johnjan AT microsoft DOT com. I don't mind giving out my personal email address because it is out there in the ether anyway on other help topics, training videos, etc. But please don't send private inqueries. I get too much mail as it is and would rather keep all posts/questions public so that everyone can benefit. -John

• Anonymous
  December 10, 2007
  Hi, I am running spd2007 and wss3. I am trying to access the web parts task pane but it's disabled with "The Web Parts Task Pane can only be run on servers running Windows Sharepoint Services". Fiurther, if I go to the Toolbox->Sharepoint controls, it says "Controls in this category require a Web site running Windows Sharepoint Services (version 3.0 )" Isn't Windows Sharepoint Services (version 3.0 ) = WSS3 ? I am definitely using a sharepoint site I know that much. What am I doing wrong, can somebody help. Thanks

• Anonymous
  December 11, 2007
  Hi Daveatbris: When you open your sever, make sure you are opening in using File > Open Site and that you are using the HTTP location, not the file system. If you can verify both those things are true, then I'd recommend exiting SPD, use Search in Windows to find all of the files that end in .web and delete them, then relaunch SPD and click File > Open Site and type in the HTTP URL again. HTH -John Jansen Test Lead, SharePoint Designer

• Anonymous
  December 12, 2007
  spdblog, Thanks, the deletion of the .web files did the trick. Without wanting to sound too stupid, what are the .web files ?

• Anonymous
  December 13, 2007
  Daveatbris, You don't sound stupid, it's not a very well documented feature of FrontPage, SharePoint Designer and Expression Web. When you open a website, we put a .web file on your system and then use that file in the future to speed up opening the web later. Sometimes they become corrupt somehow and then suddenly the site will open and have weird behavior. The telltale symptom from your post was that SPD didn't know you had a SharePoint site open, so this is always a good first troubleshooting step.

• Anonymous
  December 20, 2007
  Hi folks. Please, help me. Why can't I simply obtain the product key for the SPD 2007 trial ? Why we need to pass through such an epic journey that includes downloading the trial ... registering within the MSDN evaluation center ... fullfill forms and more forms ... wait for an e-mail that is supposed to inform us the product key and find out just a link that ends up where all this cumbersome proccess began !!!!! Is this a joke ? Microsoft doesn't want us to test it's software ? Please, I need this product key. And believe me, I followed all the standard procedures, so please, help me right to the point. Thank you.

• Anonymous
  December 27, 2007
  I am having an issue with modifying the NewForm.aspx for a list on a sub-site. Having been through the issues with the removal of the listformwebpart, I have learned to leave that well alone, just hiding and closing it via the web part properties. This issue is that after a number of modifications to the list structure I am now unable to see the new columns when I insert the Customer List Form. I have had this functioning quite well but now the new columns are just not showing up.   There are no errors being generated etc, they are just not showing up. I am starting to think I will have to delete and recreate the list, which is just a pain. Has anybody seen this problem and resolved it ? Is there a way to retain list structure outside of the list and recreate the list quickly ? i.e. is creating a content type a way to shortcut the recreation process ? Thanks

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2008
  I just downloaded the free trial of SPD, I also cannot find a product key code. The page asking me for it is still open, in hopes I'll find a key code. I see SPDBlog has responded to everyone's glitches, but there are those of us that can't even get to the glitches! Could someone please give us a trial keycode!

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 07, 2008
  Howdy. Some time ago, way up the thread, I chimed in about crashing without fail. I think I'm figuring out where the problem is. It happens on pages where I use a dataview/dataform and the dataview/dataform is pulling sample data from whatever datasource its linked to. I notice that the amount of hanging goes down significantly if I set the dataview/dataform to use sample data rather than real data. It still hangs every once in awhile, but much less. And it may or may not be my imagination, but it seems to hang more frequently on the standard newform/editform pages where I hide the standard control (because you seriously mess up your list if you remove it) and then add a custom list form. And to clarify -- it hangs, not crashes. And it typically hangs when I alt-tab back from the browser to SPD, or when I switch pages within SPD. When it first starts hanging it'll hang for 10 - 15 seconds and then give control back to me, so I continue to work. The next time it hangs for longer, and then longer, etc. By the time it hangs for over a minute I force-close SPD. Michael

• Anonymous
  February 08, 2008
  SharePoint Designer 2007 SP1 on XP crashes whenever I do a "Show Data" on a sql server datasource.  How do you keep it from crashing?  Do you guys test this stuff?

• Anonymous
  February 09, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 09, 2008
  What. pray tell, are we to do when our server is behind a proxy ?  You folks HAVE heard of proxies, haven't you ?   How do I activate when the software never asks for a userid and password ? I realize that security may not be a priority for Microsoft, but I have seen it expressed so blatantly. . .

• Anonymous
  February 12, 2008
  Can somebody please post the trial key...why must it be such a secret...it's a TRIAL?! I do not have the ability to check my Microsoft email accounts from where I am evaluating the software.

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2008
  Just started using SPD after a long time on FP2003. I was testing the app for use globally in our corporation, and the first page I opened had a closing </script> tag deleted automatically by SPD. Why is the app still mucking about with the code on the page? FP2003 doesn't even do this one? We are now stuck using  FP2003 as pages may break when edited in SPD. How can I stop this behaviour?

• Anonymous
  March 21, 2008
  SharePoint Designer (1) crashes constantly, (2) does not manage checkout state correctly (caches obsolete state information, so if you check in/out through web interface SPD never recognizes it, even after restarting),  and (3) reformats markup every time I save, which often causes corruption.  Some of these problems have been known for a year.  When are they going to be fixed?

• Anonymous
  March 21, 2008
  Another problem with SPD is that when it crashes and you click the button to submit the error report to Microsoft, 90% of the time the submission utility hangs, so the crash report never reaches Microsoft.

• Anonymous
  March 23, 2008
  Bruno and Michael, we'd love to get actual code samples from you so we could repro the issue and fix it. The product group is not aware of any cases where SPD deletes a closing </script> tag or where it reformats your markup (unless you have your editor options set to do so). We love to fix those kinds of issues when we can repro them. Mananging checkout state is another one where we are hearing this in newsgroups, but also don't have a consistent repro to fix. Thanks! -John

• Anonymous
  March 24, 2008
  Is anyone else having an issue where you create or modify a page try to save, SPD crashing and your page shows 0kb with no code.  This has happened to me a few times.  I have to go to a backup tape and start all over again.

• Anonymous
  March 24, 2008
  One additional thing that needs to be looked into is SPD is adding 1,000's of lines of blank code into my pages after I save each time.  I have a simple page that is now 6.30 megs and 50,000 lines of code.

• Anonymous
  March 25, 2008
  Hi Evan, we have seen that happen before, but we thought we had caught all of the repro cases. What kind of content does your page have on it? Any custom controls? Grouped data views? Web part Connections? Thanks!

• Anonymous
  March 25, 2008
  I am trying to add some specific issues but I do not seem to be able to post although I am logged in? Is there something else required?

• Anonymous
  March 25, 2008
  Let's try this once again -- Hi, I have been having similar problems as the other above users over the past few months. Specifically, to your above questions regarding 1000's of blank lines:

1.  I am connecting to 1 SP List with Approx 750 Records and 25 fields
2.  Using Filters on two fields
3.  Grouping on a date field
4.  No Paging
5.  Displaying Sample Data Only.  If I try and Display actual Data it seems to Freeze
6.  Conditional Formatting (Using XSL Template found on this blog as filtering-and-formatting-with-date-values)
7.  Using "Show toolbar with options for" ALL checked AND it seemed to work ok until I enabled the "Show edit item links" I have found several problems that occur after using the above XSL template and applying other options such as the Edit links. If I can provide further info let me know.  I would like to continue using SPD, but the constant crashing and hanging does not allow me to be very productive as I need to re-start the design process constantly.. Thanks, Gus

• Anonymous
  April 08, 2008
  Hi, Sharepoint Designer repeated crashes when I try opening up the availablity.aspx page inside a vanila Room and Equipment Reservations subsite created from the applicaitons template in Sharepoint 3.0 (not in MOSS2007) . I have tried deleting the .web files with no effect. I find this extremely hard to understand as other pages in the subsite are customisable and donot crash share point. Is there a work around to this situation? This issue exhibits itself both in the trail version as well as the full version of SPD2007

• Anonymous
  April 10, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 15, 2008
  I have a security issue when create approval workflow in SPD using "collect data from user". The thing is that I assigned a task to a user, but other users who have edit permission to the task list can approve/reject too. Do anyone have any idea????? Please help!!! I'd like only the user whom a task assigned to can approve/reject. Thanks

• Anonymous
  May 13, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 21, 2008
  I downloaded the trial version, got the product key and activated  Designer online. I cannot use many of the normal functions like File>New, they are just greyed out.  So how am I supposed to evaluate this software? Thanks

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2008
  We are currently running SPD on two Vista business clients and we are suffering from constant crashes. We are not using SPD with Sharepoint at present we are just creating an asp.net 2.0 website. An example of our system crashing would be a blank master page and then dragging an ASP drop down list control onto the page and hitting carriage return. I have been using this software since roll out and I must admit I am slightly frustrated with this product. Good to see I am not the only one is there a fix? or Patch???

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2008
  I have user who is working with SPD 2007, she is basically tteaching herself. We have recently run into a weird permissions problem - at least I think it is permissions I'm actually having trouble nailing down this problem as it creates no events in the event log and events on the Sharepoint Server (SPS v3 and MOSS 2007) are not very clear - not even sure if they are related. What I have been able to figure out is that She can no longer access the two pages that she modified with Sharepoint (Main Site and Homepage). Everyone else with access to the site can access without any problems. She is a Site Collection Admin (Full Control) and she can access any other pages in the site collection and she can access any other site collections that we have that she has access to. It is only the pages that she has modified with SPD that she can not access. We are both new at Sharepoint and Sharepoint Designer and neither of us can figure this one out at all and would appreciate some assistance as it appears that she has done something in SPD that has affected her and her's only permissions. Thanks in advance for any help. Charlie

• Anonymous
  July 27, 2008
  HELP! how can i activate it without internet connection?

• Anonymous
  August 01, 2008
  I am useing sharepoint v 3.0 and i want to change the welcome email so far no luck on this even serching on the net nothing no one knows a thing maybe theres someone out there that does .... please get back to me asap it would be greatly appriciated thx John

• Anonymous
  September 16, 2008
  @John Many WSS Emails can be customized, except for the welcome emails (argh!). I found this post on the MSDN Blogs that describes some research into that particular issue: http://blogs.msdn.com/anolan/archive/2008/01/07/is-it-possible-to-modify-sharepoint-email-notifications.aspx We have successfully customized other Sharepoint emails in the past, though... Peter Mularien Systems Architect Edgewater Technology, Inc.

• Anonymous
  September 30, 2008
  Hi, Any news about the insertion of 1000's of blank lines? So far i was deleting them manually on a regular basis (between 15 and 30' each time....  :-(  ) but now SPD is adding blank columns which is much more difficult to get rid of.... Any fix in sight, or any hint to delete such painful lines/columns? Thanks! Gilles

• Anonymous
  October 17, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 20, 2008
  This is the first time that I develop a website! And I forced to develop on SharePoint. I'd download the MS office SharePoint Designer 2007. Can I design a website without Windows SharePoint service 3? I will use the MS office SharePoint Designer 2007 Only for design the website with intranet hosting.

• Anonymous
  April 24, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 23, 2009
  A coworker and I tried removing the .web trick that spdblog supplied: When you open a website, we put a .web file on your system and then use that file in the future to speed up opening the web later. Sometimes they become corrupt somehow and then suddenly the site will open and have weird behavior. Would like to know what corrupts the file...we delete .web and some days SPD works fine several days in a row and then suddenly, no pattern, it starts crashing several times in the same day. We delete the .web, start over and can work for an hour/15 minutes(pick a number) and it crashes again. Other times we work on the files for days at a time with no crashes. Crashing is just random as far as we can tell, but always the fix works, sometimes we just have to do it 10 times a day. other days we get lucky and we go the whole day w/o a crash.

• Anonymous
  August 27, 2009
  I've had a lot of the buggie performance issues described above (in what would otherwise be a very good product) and got fast relief with some of the hanging and crashing with 2 simple steps described in this post: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointcustomization/thread/0dc02230-5180-4727-9873-1d62b05f0382/ namely,

1.  Set all your Data View web parts to show with sample data. (in the Common Data View tasks window).
2. Make sure the "show data values" checkbox is cleared in the Data Source Details tab. I also have the thousands of lines eventually appended problem. Didn't realize it was happening until both SPD and VS 2008 refused to load the page. Had to examine it in Notepad to see all of the garbage at the end of the file. It's a little riskie using SPD, but sometimes it does something quick and slick that makes more time for  development-intensive projects.

• Anonymous
  September 25, 2009
  I hope that someone from MS is reading this because I'd like to report a bug. With CSS in the "Manual Style Application" mode, if I type out a sentence and then select a part of that sentence (e.g., a single word) and apply a simple format like bold or the color red, it applies the style to the entire sentence (or paragraph). This isn't a problem in automatic mode. To clarify why I'm using this method instead of using a style sheet, I'm using SP Designer to create HTML emails. Since some email clients still don't support CSS, I need to attach strict XHTML-compliant style tags to each element on the page. Other than this rather troublesome bug, SP Designer is great for creating HTML emails.

• Anonymous
  November 13, 2009
  We use sharepoint designer and it's really good for the most part, but it does crash when you start messing with XSL - this needs to be fixed because it really renders the tool un-usable for true customizations.

• Anonymous
  December 16, 2009
  Hi, We have used MOSS 2007, and used Sharepoint designer to design the workflows. The workflow worked fine for around 7 months, but suddenly one day when the approvers click on the link which is provided in the default mailers for approving a request, they face an error page which gives the following error: 'No item exists at http://knetsites.wipro.com/sites/125/ProjectRoomNew/SDelivery/Workflows/Helpline Requests/Req.aspx?ID=2926&List=5a505870-7419-41c8-b0f0-5ef650528246&Source=http://knetsites.wipro.com/sites/125/ProjectRoomNew/SDelivery/Lists/Tasks/AllItems.aspx.  It may have been deleted or renamed by another user. ' Where as the record can still be found in the list. Please help ! our support team says that Sharepoint designer silently reformats the code ! is this true?? Please help !! :(

• Anonymous
  January 18, 2010
  I cannot install SharePoint Designer 2007 on XP with Office 2007.  It is saying "encountered an error and cannot continue setup.  No other message.   How do I install it?

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2010
  Kevin, I created an approval workflow using Collect from user option. But the approver receives three automated mail.

1. Notification to approve
2. After approval, task has been changed alert
3. Another task has been changed alert Is there an option to suppress the last two task has been changed alert?

• Anonymous
  March 31, 2010
  Hi there, I'm using Microsoft Sharepoint Designer 2010 (BETA) in order to adjust the layout of the intranet page and it just began crashing when I try to edit the site. When the final version will be available to download? Best regards, Luís, Portugal

• Anonymous
  May 04, 2010
  i use Sharepoint desinger to create a document that I then have use Adobe acrobat 9 and do a web capture.  it was working jsut fine and gave me the look that i required bookmarks and the page was letter size  NOW, it somehow is giving a pdf docment that the appears to be on letter size but the printing is only aobut 2" wide.  I don't know if the problem is sharepoint or adobe.  any suggestions.