Viewing a Site with SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer is a free utility from Microsoft that you can use to create and modify SharePoint sites. It is a desktop application that connects to a local or on-premise SharePoint 2010 server. It works equally well connected to a SharePoint Online 2010 server hosted on Office 365.

You can use SharePoint Designer to make all the same types of customizations that you can through the SharePoint UI. Everything that you have done so far in this chapter can be accomplished through SharePoint Designer. It is a desktop app so the user experience is very different. While it may take a little more time to get used to it, once you become familiar with it, you'll probably find it to be easier and faster to use.