Benefits and disadvantages of SharePoint designer

SharePoint designer, formerly called FrontPage, is a website client tool used to edit and edit HTML. Now the name has been changed and the features have been enhanced, which is a useful supplement for Sharepoint project development. But as far as I know, many professional SharePoint developers simply don't need this tool to do anything, why? The main reason is that when you modify a page, Sharepoint designer will help you add some materials without telling you. Sometimes it will cause a lot of trouble if you don't pay attention to it. Another reason is that if you modify any page through SharePoint designer, when you press save in the menu bar, it will save a copy in the database, it also disconnects from any source file in the file system. This process is called customized or unghosting. if you want to share some files across sites, such as the master page or page layout, you cannot use SharePoint designer to do this. In this case, we usually directly use Visual Studio to edit these pages. However, when vs is used to edit the master page, we only have the Code interface, while SharePoint designer provides visual support, you can switch between code and design at will, which is useful for beginners. Therefore, it depends on your actual needs. If unghosting is acceptable, it is indeed a good choice. On msdn, Sharepoint designer is currently the only tool that can edit the master page in WYSIWYG mode. It can also be used to open the SharePoint site so that we can browse the content. I don't know what other tools can do this, because almost everything in Sharepoint is stored in sqlserver, it is usually invisible. Of course, you can open the site directly in a browser, but they provide different views. The SharePoint designer view is similar to Windows Explorer, with a tree structure on the left and content displayed on the right. For example, if I use it to upload a large number of images to SharePoint, I just need to copy and paste the files as if I were operating a common Windows folder.

Finally, let's take a look at customized (unghosting) and uncustomized (ghosting). The following is a simple comparison:

Customized	Uncustomized
Save in Database	Stored in the file system
Relatively slow reading	Fast Reading
Limited to one site	Cross-Site Sharing

For developing workflow? I have never used it. Chairman Mao said that no investigation has no right to speak, so I can't say anything about this.