When a list or library is displayed on a SharePoint page, it uses a variation of either list view or data view web parts. In total, there are four types of web parts – list view, list form, data view, data form. The ‘view’ web parts let you show read only information. The ‘form’ web parts let you create forms that let the user modify the underlying data.

These web parts use XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) to display data and thus the official names of these web parts are XSLT List View and XSLT Data View web parts. Think of XSLT as a styling language for XML. SPD lets you fetch data from a variety of sources (lists, libraries, XML files, databases, RSS feeds, and server side scripts). All of this data is returned back to SPD in XML form. Then XSLT is used to transform this data into HTML that browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox can show to the user.

You don’t need knowledge of XSLT to work with these web parts. Creating pages with list view and data view web parts does not require programming experience at all actually. Once you render your data using these web parts, you have the option to conditionally format that data. You can chance colors, background, font, hide or show content and more – all with a few customization steps. As mentioned earlier, you can also create form pages using form web parts that will let you modify the underlying data.

The XSLT Data View web part lets you make connections to your databases and saves that connection information within the site. You can use this method to report on live dynamic data directly from your database onto your SharePoint pages. Similarly, web service connections can be made to fetch any data on your intranet or the internet. Web services is a standard that’s supported by all platforms so you can fetch data from non-Microsoft based systems such as Linux, Macintosh and databases such as Oracle and DB2.