There are a lot of changes in the new SharePoint Designer 2010 product that are worth talking about. Some of them are really great and some are just different and can easily trip you up if you’ve become accustomed to Designer 2007. One such “hitch” for me was figuring out Safe mode vs. Advanced mode.
To edit pages in designer you can navigate to the page in the navigation pane which will bring you to a page settings view. This can be confusing but once you get used to it I think you may find it to be pretty handy. The Page Settings page contains file information, permissions information and version history information. You will also find on the page a link to “Edit File” and “Manage all file properties in the browser”. You can edit the actual file by clicking on “Edit file”. Designer will open the page in a new tab with the same name and even the same icon as the settings page. From a usability perspective I found this to be a very strange and not very helpful. With a bunch of open pages you cannot tell which the actual page is and which is the settings page unless you click the tabs, even a simple change in icon would fix this. Your welcome Microsoft!
With your page open, you are now ready to start editing…or are you? If you find that all the code is highlighted yellow and you are unable edit you need to switch to Advanced Mode. In the ribbon, go to Home>Editing>Advanced Mode. You are now ready to start editing.
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