SharePoint Designer 2013 #SPD2013
I have seen a lot recently about the changes to SPD 2013 and especially the removal of the Design View from page editing and the impact that would have on peoples normal daily SharePoint work. The rational for the change is here on the SharePoint team blog, some of the responses on End User SharePoint are worth a read, and non of them are very positive. So I thought I would take a look a couple of typical End User style visual solution and see it can see be used in the brave new world of SPD2013.
Using calculated columns to add colour coding to your SharePoint lists
This excellent solution comes from Sarah Haase. I won’t cover the steps for 2010, but will go straight into 2013.
The 1st step is to grab a copy of SPD2013 preview from the MS download site and get this running in your SP2013 world, then setup your list and calculated column and open your site in SPD2013, at first glance a site in SPD2013 looks exactly the same as an SPD2010, but when you open the list-view you have the option of code view or code view, nice !
So how do we make appropriate change now that we have no visual representation of the page ?
If we go to the List View Tools tab section and select the Design tab, we have the option to Customize the XLST for the entire view (this is available in SPD2010 as well)
Now its a case of searching for the tag
<xsl:value-of select="$thisNode/@*[name()=current()/@Name]"/>
and updating it to read
<xsl:value-of select="$thisNode/@*[name()=current()/@Name]" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
Save the page view, preview in a browser and voila, a colour coded column in SharePoint 2013.
So was this more difficult then 2010 ?, The answer is Yes and No, without the visual representation of the page it would have been much more difficult to figure out which tag to update, but once you know that, the actual change is no more difficult, but I think that is the crux of the issue, features like conditional formatting are now going to be much much more difficult to apply in SPD2013 when we are going to have to work through the entire list view code.
SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans 
Nice tip Neil!
I agree it seems almost easier than in SPD2010 but this is because we know how it was done before, and therefore ca find the tag. The challenge will definitely be for new users who jumped in straight into 2013 without any legacy SharePoint knowledge… Then it’s pure code for them. From “advanced users” they may start becoming “junior web developers” 😉
You are quite right Francois, but even if you know XLST, making these type of updates will be quite some task. Imagine trying to apply conditional formatting to a list !
my SPD 2013 (final, not preview) has no “List View Tools”..
same here: no “List View Tools”
There’s a way you can get it to show up. You’ll need to highlight the web part you want to alter the view on in SP Designer. Once the full webpart has been highlighted, go to the Insert tab and select Data View.
Paste over your highlighted web part with the Data View you just inserted. Once you do that, you’ll have the Data View List Tools as an option.
Hope that makes sense. I might have to reply with a link to pictures.
I have the same issue. I am running the current RTM (15.0.4454.1000) and have selected exactly the area as above. Instead of seeing “Code View Tools” and “List View Tools” as above, I get “Code View Tools” and “Web Part Tools”, which don’t include the “Customize XSLT” button. Forcing the button onto the toolbar simply results in a greyed out “Customize XSLT” button. Any help here would be very much appreciated.
Hi,
I have upgraded my test system to SPD 2013 RTM version (15.0.4420) and it still works fine for me.
When you open the ListView page make sure you click into the XsltListViewWebPart section of the page, then the ‘List View Tools’ menu should appear.
Hi, I’ve carefully followed Sarah’s initial instructions along with those here, but in my case I can’t find the tag. What can I be missing? I tried using the Find tool within SPD 2013, no joy. My view is created in an Office 365 SharePoint 2 site that Microsoft is part-way through migrating to SP 2013 so SPD 2010 no longer works 😦
Wow, thanks to your instructions I’ve got this working in MS-hosted SharePoint 2 which is being migrated from SP2010 to SP2013. How can I get the RAG indicators to show up in a view embedded in a web part on a page, though? So far I only get it working for regular views.