Ill will demonstrate to you how easy it is to add your own dataview on a Sharepoint Page. It would be as easy at 13 steps.
Here it goes
1. Start your Sharepoint Designer and choose a page you want to add your dataview or you can also create a test page if you wish
2. On that page add a Data View Sharepoint control
Step 2 : Adding a Data View
3. Choose your datasource from different repositories already available on your Sharepoint site like Lists and Libraries, you can also add a dataview from a Database or XML if you wish.
Step 3 : Choose a repository
4. Now choose your list and click Show Data to view whats in that data source
Step 4 : Choosing a List
5. Verify if this is the data you wanted, it will be shown per record and you can go through each record by clicking the right paging arrow on top
Step 5 : Verify your Data
6. Once you are satisfied with the data, Right click on the row and Insert as Table if you want a table format, Bulleted List if you want a bulleted list, comma list as a comma list and form list if you want a form list. You can easily change the formatting anyway on the Code View if you wish. In this example I will use Table.
Step 6 : Insert your Data to your Page
7. Now you can see from the Design view the results. From this point the Data View creation is finished so you can now check it in and publish your work. But if you want to further customize go on to the next steps.
Step 7 : View your Results
8. Click now on the arrow on the top right corner of the control and it will show you a menu of what you can customize on the Data View
Step 8 : Customizing your Data View
9. If you want to Filter the results, click on Filter and you can filter it like how you do it on SQL by using a clause builder.
Step 9 : Filtering Results
10. You can even sort and group the result set by the fields of your choice.
Step 10 : Sorting and Grouping Results
11. You can also change the items for display by limiting the page size or item count by clicking on the paging
Step 11 : Paging the Result Set
12. You can also limit the Columns that are on display.
Step 12 : Customizing Columns
13. An finally you can choose from a choice of different view types, but if you are not satisfied you can also change it on the code view. If you know HTML this would be a breeze.
Step 13 : Customizing the View
Thats it! Really Simple