Welcome to the SharePoint Designer 2010 Essentials guide. The goal of this guide is to help you gain sufficient knowledge and understanding of SharePoint Designer 2010 and how to work with it. 

Using SharePoint Designer 2010, you can rapidly create SharePoint solutions in response to business needs. Compose no-code solutions that encompass a variety of common scenarios; from collaborative sites and web publishing to Line-Of-Business data integration, business intelligence solutions and human workflows, all leveraging the building blocks available in SharePoint in an easy to use environment. Developers can use SharePoint Designer 2010 to get a quick start on SharePoint development projects.

The following are the list of major benefits of SharePoint Designer 2010. 

• Rapidly Develop SharePoint Solutions without Code: Build composite SharePoint applications by configuring or designing components without having to write any code. The improved user interface, easy connectivity to external systems, improved views and forms, and enhanced workflow design capabilities allow us to respond more rapidly to our business needs.
• Easily Connect with External Data: With SharePoint Designer 2010, we can easily integrate external data into any SharePoint solution. Discover available data sources, create External Content Types that define the data operations you want to enable in SharePoint and have SharePoint Designer auto-generate SharePoint external lists and required forms.
• Deploy Safe Customizations with Confidence: SharePoint Designer 2010 provides control over where and how developers use SharePoint Designer throughout all levels of your SharePoint deployment. Preserve a consistent brand and layout across a site collection or web application by controlling customization.