Get started with Power Apps | LRN244

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to our session at microsoft ignite you have made it to getting started or get started rather with powerapps thanks for joining us yes my name is april dunham and i'm a senior developer advocate here at microsoft and i'm greg holman i'm a senior power platform advocate at microsoft a little bit different but really mostly the same depending on who pays us anyway let's go ahead and get started we are inside our one of our learn live sessions for one of our learn modules in this case get started with powerapps if you want to find these steps later you can go right out to aka.mslrn244 and you'll get this page where you can go step by step through that same content we're going to be going over today or you can find the slides and video later of course as well so our agenda today we're going to introduce power apps go through some of the building blocks the related technologies power apps is really of course part of the power platform all the different ways you can create a power app design your first power app and actually get that first powerapp created and maybe onto a phone of course this session is live and interactive there is chat make sure you say hi if you have questions go ahead and ask them and we'll be answering them as we go and then if we have time at the end we'll answer as many as we can before we run out of time but with that let's go ahead and kick it off uh in april once you introduce powerapps yeah so to get started i want to cover a few things we want to explore what powerapps is and how it can make your business more efficient we want to talk about what technologies we can use to perform different tasks in our power apps we're going to learn about different ways that we can build apps and power apps and how we can create our first app with powerapps using an excel workbook so diving right in what exactly is powerapps powerapps is a suite of applications services connectors and a data platform that gives us the opportunity to build applications all with no code these applications can be desktop tablet and mobile applications and when you say no code april what is it do you mean you mean actually no code or just a lower class of code or what do we talk about lower class of code so you don't have to learn a traditional programming language like c sharp or javascript to be able to build a power app you can use excel like functions and a point-and-click interface kind of similar to powerpoint to build an app okay so what are some of the things that we can do with powerapps well we can use and build apps quickly using the skills that we already have so kind of like i mentioned if you're familiar with some of the office tools already like powerpoint like excel and really familiar with functions and formulas in excel you can build a powerapp quite easily using those skills we can connect to cloud services and data sources that you're already using thanks to our connector model and of the data sources that we offer with the power platform we're able to consume data from all of our microsoft 365 and dynamic services and other sas products all within the power platform we can also share our applications instantly with our co-workers easily so that they can use them either on their phones or tablets or their desktop devices and that's actually where i end up using the most is like not really on my phone as much especially now that we're at home all the time but through the web all the time it'll run in any web browser as well yeah i use them quite a bit in in the web browser also i'm also a big fan of the mobile device because especially when we're on the go to be able to have the ability and flexibility to use it on whatever device that you need to absolutely and so what are some of the things just to get your eye you know the ideas going in your head here no we can build applications with low code but what type of applications can we build well really the possibilities are endless so think of scenarios like equipment in the field so that's what's really cool about this this can be four scenarios for someone in an office or you know in their home office on their desktop or someone out in the field like a foreman that needs to do an inspection report or equipment inspection to check that in they can pull this up on their tablets or their phone and create an application and build it and use it all within on their phone we can be scenarios like employee management so if you need some kind of check in check out some vacation requests time off request solutions that's a great use case for a powerapp as well what about you greg what are some of your favorite use cases uh some of the things i've found where in in sales like um in person in a showroom or something like that maybe you have a lot of information about your products um in your systems maybe an internal website or something like that and i know as a customer i it's not my favorite thing to have to follow an employee back to a computer wherever it is in the showroom so they can look up something um we've seen people create powerapps pull out that same data right there on the device that somebody can carry around whether it's a tablet or even a phone and pull out that same information and be able to carry on that conversation and with the customer in front of the thing they were asking about to begin with which helps sales it helps the customer it helps everybody and it's been super easy to get started definitely one of the use cases that i love recently is being able to use it to check in and check out of a facility and for a contact list checking in so being able to scan a barcode on your phone say in another tablet or something that has a power app on it to be able to get into a location it's a really timely and great use case as well definitely so what are some of the building blocks of powerapps in general so there are three main areas that we'll go to to either make or build our applications to use them and to govern them and uh greg is actually going to go a little bit into these building blocks a little bit more here thank you april uh so as april just mentioned there's a few different building blocks that make powerapps powerapps we're going to go through the real basic steps sites you might run into places you might go if you're creating your apps or you might just read about in documentation so you know well what we're talking about we mention them first most obvious it's the power app's own home page at make.powerapps.com this is a site you're going to probably most often wind up on when you're building your powerapps if you're building an app you're going to start here this is what i load up all the time whether i'm creating a new app or even going to find an app to run inside a web browser make.powerapps.com is where you want to go next up is the powerapps studio it does have its own url create.powerapps.com studio that's not

url that you're really going to type into your browser whole whole lot this is a site that's going to pop open when you create a new app from the uh the make website and this is where we actually make our power apps we add our controls we add we set our properties we add the different screens and so on and um up here at the very top right next to the fx here you see our formula bar much like an excel formula bar this is where the code runs in a powerapp and it's just a matter a number of different functions that you can then chain together a lot like you do inside excel that language in case you're been wondering is actually called power fx we actually gave it a name just this morning so now we have something to call it instead of abstract random language this is powerfx that's that formula language you might be hearing about as we go through and you're going to be using it inside the create platform an awful lot and then did you have something nope okay uh and then inside powerapps mobile this is a lot of where you're going to be using your powerapps now why you mentioned earlier you can run it inside a web browser but more often than not the users that you're recruiting these apps for are going to run them inside inside a phone or a tablet and there is a windows app as well all these are are available and they're available in your app store of choice whether it is ios or android you can find the powerapps app you download and run that and then inside that you find all the powerapps that people in your organization have created and last but not least here we have the power platform admin center this is where if you are an administrator of a particular environment in the power platform you can configure those settings add people to an environment um update things as you need to so reset environments you have to a lot of the kind of administratively uh tasks that are really in there sometimes this is going to be entirely managed by your it organization and that's okay they're used to managing this sort of stuff sometimes i might pass on administrative tasks for some of those environments to people on the outside i t in the organization that um are closer to the people actually inside that environment using it now what do i mean why i keep mentioning an environment it's a way that the power platform has to separate out uh sets of applications data workflows all together into a particular group and these environments can have different users they can have different security policies they can have different uh permissions on them and it's a way to say keep your budget apps separate from all the rest of the apps that your employees are using to make sure that data doesn't get out to people that doesn't that don't need it for example all that is managed right here inside the admin center and you can't really talk about administration with a microsoft uh product if you don't talk about licensing now most folks that come in to use powerapps or power automate use a license that comes with their microsoft 365 plan so if you have microsoft 365 you're using office you're using teams you're using email and it all comes through um one login then you can you get powerapps and power automate to use against that microsoft 365 information whether it's an excel sheet or sitting in sharepoint or microsoft excel to create apps based on that information now you might have a powerapps license based on your dynamics license if you're using dynamics you're already using powerapps in a way and you're definitely using the underlying dataverse that comes with it and so if you have a dynamics license you are good to go you have a powerapps license to do everything you need to do inside that environment and is that uh greg what some people might have her called as a seated license and some are like the licensing documentation is that the same thing yeah that is that is the same thing that um if you have a license that they might see called a seated license that's what they're talking about where if you've already got a seat for one one of these other licenses has gotten covered um that's what they're talking about but you might also see standalone licenses mentioned i mentioned documentation and elsewhere and what they're talking about is a license for apps power automate and one of the other powerpoint power platform licenses themselves and they come in two flavors you might see it as called premium license or a standalone license and you can license things either per user or per app those are two main ways you do it and i'll dig into that just a little bit but if you have one of these licenses then you have have access to everything that the power platform can do whether getting your data from microsoft 365 or the hundreds of other available data source connectors if you want to uh connect to custom data sources that maybe we don't have a connector for yet if you want to do some other things that are available inside the power platform you do need a premium or standalone license and let's dig into what that looks like a little bit here so her app licensing allows you to license the app that you're creating yourself and that app isn't just the one maybe one power app that can be up to two applications and one powerapps portal for a ver for a specific business scenario so maybe you have a portal that people can log into your customers to check on maybe the trouble tickets and maybe you have two different apps for the same situation where maybe you have an app for your customer service folks and then a different app for your sales folks both talking to that the same customers both talking that same information around the same scenario just different apps for different uh audiences that can be covered under this per app license that is best if you have a bunch of users using a single app and maybe not nearly as many using the rest of your apps maybe you want to license that particular app separately now on the other side there is a per user license where you're licensing the users using the power apps and not the apps themselves so this basically grants a particular user to use and create as many power apps as they want to inside the organization um within organization governance guidelines and all that of course but they won't be limited by the license at all for what they're using so this can be a lot more flexible for your for your organization that if you want to turn on power apps for everybody you want to see what the organization can do with with with powerapps maybe you can license it per user and not make your users need to worry about that and just have everything be covered that's an option for you as well now licensing always has a million questions and other thoughts people might have especially when you start talking to the people that wind up paying for these licenses and there's a few uh useful resources here as well you can go to powerapps.microsoft.com pricing us. pricing or powerapps.microsoft.com portals for the pricing there as well the portals pricing the licensing is a little bit different it's more based around usage than per user necessarily but to make sure you take a look at that website to dig into uh just a little more about the licensing and what what you might be running into now before we get any further this is a learn module so we need to do our first knowledge check so in your chat make sure you go ahead and answer the questions that are there and and kind of throw in your answer but question number one for our session today where do you configure and customize your app is it a in the powerapps mobile um right there inside your your your tablet um is it in the powerapps admin center you configure and customize things there um is it inside microsoft dynamics 365 could you customize your apps in there don't not feeling like it's it's any of those so far i don't know about you yeah i'm not i'm not feeling really all those and you know the admin center may be dynamics maybe but dynamics apps are kind of their own thing and then last but not least we have inside the powerapp studio which the word studio just kind of in general might give it away that is in fact our answer all right so before we move on we've got a couple couple questions here in the chat um from jennifer we have a question are powerapps just for internal users not public um that is generally the case now powerapps portals can be can be uh for public use but powerapps themselves do require somebody in your organization uh to use them so you do log in through microsoft 365 uh and to even get into the app itself and so they are for inside your organization um to do all the different things that you can do inside your work so that is for just uh powerapps folks um i am seeing that by and large most folks did say powerapp studio on this one so that's great and one more question is a reason someone would use a desktop copy of powerapps to build workflows for a sharepoint online site so there's a few different things going on here so you can inside the uh there's a powerapps app that you can run for windows right now although we're working on a brand new version of that uh coming down the road that we just talked about and a big announcement today that power automate desktop is going to be included inside your windows license to download and start building workflows right there inside the windows app now power automate and power automate desktop are there are separate from what we're talking about right now as far as as far as licensing and how you create these things if you're creating a power app you definitely are going to be doing it inside the web experience inside the powerapp studio at create.powerapps.com if you're creating power automate workflows there is a web editor for that as well and then inside power automate desktop you can start creating flows there also but that is separate from what we're going to be digging into today but power automate is another part of the power platform it's our workflow engine for the power platform and it has uh that desktop application to do a lot more than you can do just inside the website and i was really excited about that announcement yeah and we'll be talking about power automates here a little bit more and how we can use that together with powerapps for our business solutions and speaking of power automate why don't we just jump right into our related technologies april what do you think great yes so as far as power apps you know we know we can use that to build applications but typically when we're talking about solving a problem or building a business solution it's not just an app there's usually some other things involved we need to maybe pull data from other data sources maybe we need a workflow process as part of that for an approval so that's where these other related technologies really come into play so one of the big things is data sources so we briefly mentioned this in the beginning here but with the power platform we have the ability with data sources and these things called connectors to bring cloud and even on premise data into our power apps so we can access that through these built-in connectors or even something called custom connectors so we have um i think over 400 different connectors to various sash products whether that's things like sharepoint and dynamics or other products like salesforce and twitter um but if you need to build something that connects to something that's not in one of our 400 different connectors right now we can build what's called a custom connector so that we can connect to any of the restful apis that you might want to access and we even have that gateway so what that means is if there's some kind of data that we need to connect to behind the firewall on an on-premise server like sql or sharepoint on-prem whatever it might be we can install this gateway and use that to connect to that data into our powerapps applications we also have something called microsoft dataverse so this is our compliance and scalable data service that's fully integrated into powerapps and the entire power platform so that's a good solution and database that we'll talk a little bit more about later on here and then we have power automate we were just talking about this so if we need some kind of workflow solution maybe we need an approval maybe we want to receive some notifications send an email uh run a process go pull data from somewhere else whatever it might be we can leverage power automates and tandem with power apps to build that holistic end-to-end business solution i know for myself i use power automate more than not to send out those approvals we where company wants to save some data maybe it needs a manager okay before the data gets uh pushed out somewhere powered i mean it's really great for stuff like that and we can run those workloads straight from our powerhouse we need to exactly big fan of power automate here especially when used with our power apps all right so a little bit more about those data sources than those connectors so in power apps in our canvas applications most of the time you're going to want to pull external data from somewhere so whether that is sharepoint or the common data or dataverse so it says common data service on there so it's something i wanted to bring up here um if you see that that's actually what dataverse is now that's what's the old name for dataverse so it was recently renamed there but also pulling information from things like dropbox and onedrive so we can just leverage the connector and pull and consume the data and depending on the connector we can either write to it that each connector has different actions and things that it can do so we might be able to read data from it or maybe even write and store data in some of these different connectors and april do it folks have a way to control which of these connectors people can use in their apps yes great question and this is something that if you did catch some of the other sessions today at ignite that they have continuous more improvements on this so we have something called dlp policies that we can set up in that power platform admin center that greg was just talking about so we can do things like restrict people from being able to say use the twitter connector and tandem with the sharepoint connector or even down to the level now what they announced in some of the earlier sessions here of being able to control what actions in a certain connector you can do so we have complete control over this in the power platform admin center to be able to determine what we can do and who can use and consume some of these connectors and just to add to what april said if you see things referring to dlps or dlp policies those are data loss policies those are basically the limits around what connectors can do so that it folks can feel better about having folks all across the environment or organization creating these apps yeah thanks to for clarifying that so data loss prevention meaning avoiding leaking data that might be personal that you don't want to get out there you know maybe in the twitter scenario not leaking social security numbers out there just you know restricting that in some way that's what those data loss prevention policies do so a little bit more on the on-premise data side of things so if you do have data that's not stored in the cloud it is stored somewhere on premises we have this gateway so it sets what's going to happen is you can install this on an on-premise computer and that can communicate with powerapps in the power platform now the cool thing about this is too you set this gateway up somewhere on one of your on-premise computers and you can use that gateway both in power apps and power automate to pull data from whatever service that is that you're connecting to with the gateway so really opens up the possibilities of the type of data and services that we can connect to now dataverse now i mentioned this this was formerly known as that common data service you saw there this is the power platforms data service and database that lets you store and manage your data for all the different power platform applications whether it be powerapps power automates or virtual agents now with dataverse there's lots of different reasons that we might want to use this say over other databases like sharepoint so for one we get standard and custom tables within dataverse so that we can have a rich storage option that's relational meaning we can have rich data types in that simple to manage so you don't have to be a database administrator and know a lot about queries in a sql server to be able to manage this it's a really simple easy to use interface to manage and it's securable and it's able to we can even have permissions restrict see who can see you know certain data in there down to what columns and rows of data that certain individuals can see and we also are not a benefit of this we can easily access our dynamics data so if you are wanting to build say an application that does consume some information from dynamics we're able to store that data in this dataverse database so that we can easily access it that's april that's one thing that i've found why you would use dataverses as opposed to something like sharepoint when somebody's asking why why maybe you would want to put your data there and when you've had sharepoint for such a long time and one thing i always point at that sharepoint um people always asked for is when i was living that sharepoint life was the ability to have different security on particular fields in in your table so maybe people can have access to all the data in a table except one field maybe it's a social security number or some sort of employee id field where you want to lock that down only certain people the dataverse can do that and i can do it pretty easily and without needing a phd and data sources to figure out how to do it as well which is really great exactly yeah i come from a sharepoint background myself and that was usually one of the big reasons why you would transition off of say using sharepoint and into dataverse was for that that reason alone being able to open up the doors and have more flexible security options all right so you know what what else can we do here so i mentioned rich metadata so you know going along with the sharepoint scenario if we needed to build say a application that allows us to upload pictures so maybe we want to take a picture out on the job site of something and have that been stored in our app if you're using something like sharepoint that's a little bit difficult to do with sharepoint as a database you have usually there's some kind of flow involved to help you upload that image to the right location that's something that dataverse can easily handle because it has built-in image fields um that allow that to be much easier so that's that rich metadata that we can get with dataverse also logic and validation so we mentioned you know locking down certain columns or fields of data also restricting maybe what can go in it right or maybe enforcing a field needing to be required if another field equals this those kind of logic and validation rules are easy to apply in dataverse as well one of the other things that i really love about dataverse is really honestly dataverse for teams if you are in one of the organizations that has allowed you to create power apps right so right there inside microsoft teams the environment those run in is called database for teams and what it allows you to do is again right inside teams start creating the the tables and all the column definitions um and maybe even start entering the data that your app needs inside the teams without ever having to go to another site without ever having to leave where you are and that's something you can only really get with with dataverse running inside teams yes and if you haven't checked out data version teams definitely encourage you to look that up it just gives us a great way to build teams based applications leveraging powerapps and dataverse really powerful so you know speaking of dataverse for teams what that kind of is comprised of a bunch of the different power platform technologies so uh with the power platform we're looking at four main things so today we're talking about powerapps for the application development side of things but we also can take advantage of power bi if we need to do things like dashboards and reporting in analytics we have power automate which we briefly touched on for workflow automation now this can be automation for cloud services you know connecting to powerapps and sharepoint and things like that but can also be for that uh robotic process automation that we talked about with the power automate desktop so automating things that don't have a cloud endpoint or somewhere that we can easily get to maybe it's copying things from one excel spreadsheet to another things like that that's something that we can do with that robotic process automation that power automate desktop offers and then we have power virtual agents and when we talk about that dataverse for teams that greg brought up this is a great use case for power virtual agents because we can easily build chat bots that we can integrate into things like teams with no to low code so we don't have to go out to something like azure bot service and know the ins and outs of that and we just have kind of like a point-and-click editor where we can create chatbots and virtual agents so diving into uh this a little bit deeper let's let's talk about power automate some more because that is a great integration point with power apps like we kind of talked about so any traditional workflow that you might want to automate it's a great use case for power automate so it's going to allow you to bring in things like our you know robotic process automation automate legacy systems so whether it is like someone mentioned earlier taking a sharepoint designer workflow and automating that and replacing it with power automate we can do that um all with this one tool and an example that we'll see here of how that can kind of work of the power automate logic um so some things that we can do um if we go there um to that slide we can check and see you know get an item from a sharepoint list so we can have these things called triggers so what kicks off this workflow and then we can have these things called actions what do we want to happen after an event happens so after maybe um you know something is added into a sharepoint list maybe we want to send an email for approval or maybe we want to create another item in a list we can send emails and meeting requests and add files to one drive really the possibilities are endless with all those connectors that we have at our disposal so april somebody actually asked a question in the chat what a typical example of a process might be that you can integrate or automate with uh outlook 365. so we have one

example here just sending an email uh from a workflow um but what do you have any any favorites around like maybe outlook data that you've seen uh yeah so one of the ones that i love is when an email is received so that's a trigger that we can have so say you want to prioritize or get an instant alert on your phone anytime you get an email from your boss because you want to make sure that you don't miss it we actually have these things in power automate called templates so there's a template for that where we can say send me an alert anytime that i receive an email from my manager and my boss so that's a great example of some of the integrations that we can do with the outlet connector and one that i actually use quite a bit what about you greg uh that that's that's one of my favorite ones as well um but the other one i i've seen is when i have a power app that somebody can use to create like a request to present a topic um internally inside of one of a set of meetings we have and as soon as we have one of those meetings approved then it reaches out to that the shared calendar that the meetings have grabs the calendar invite replaces the content with like the speaker name and what they're going to be talking about and then sends that update out to everybody so that enables somebody to approve that somebody's going to present and have somebody present and just have that calendar invite just show up for everybody without having to have a single person send that out and manage all those invites it's all managed by the app which has been really helpful um in that sort of process awesome sounds like a great use case we do have one more question before we go forward somebody is asking if workflow approval data is stored inside dataverse uh yes so it actually is so um there's some tables there in dataverse that stores that information that's kept there but the cool thing too about uh powerautomate in particular you know when approvals we have the ability to put that data you know or kind of build our own um blogging per se of you know when something happens so like if something is approved and you needed that to go somewhere else maybe you have a special ticketing system that you use and we have a connector for it you can build that in into your flow as well so yes it it is there in dataverse but you do have the ability to move that and somewhere else if you need to and one more question oh lots of lots of questions about dataverse which is great by the way folks um would lists and they've capitalized lists so i'm assuming they mean sharepoint lists be on a simple or microsoft list i suppose whatever it's called um would list be a simple version of dataverse for storing info um you know it's different so you know microsoft list first of all and sharepoint list are actually the same thing um so just get getting that out there um yeah i mean in a way i mean it could be a good place to store data if you don't have a ton of data and if you don't need to do things like we mentioned earlier like have really strict security on different things um that is you know a place that you can store the data there just might be scenarios where you know if your requirements like the security things we talked about or you're storing a lot of data and need lots of logic and validation where dataverse might be a better fit but yes uh microsoft lists are definitely a place that you can store data with your powerapps yep there is a connector for that of course um i think of it as somewhere in between uh dataverse where you might put a lot of data and put a lot of um uh users or a lot of load into and then um somewhere between that and maybe microsoft excel which is um very straightforward and and very um not really meant for a ton of data updates but maybe more reading uh than writing updates back then you have uh microsoft lists in the middle to kind of fill that gap if if it meets your needs at that level yeah i had a great it's good kind of step up there of the different data sources all right um so talking a little bit more about the other integrations power bi this is an important one to to go over so any scenario where you need some kind of analytics within your business solution or process that you're building that is a great fit for power bi so it allows business users to use a number of different charts and graphs so you can have things like maps in there um you can have uh linear charge bar charts you know uh whatever you need that power bi usually has some kind of visualization for it and even comprehensive reports and dashboards so how does that work in tandem with powerapps then so there's a few things that we can do one we have the ability to embed a power bi title into our powerapps applications and i use this one quite a bit i love this integration so we can have a powerapps canvas app we can put the power bi tile component or widget there in our powerapp and see a particular visualization in the context of our app other ways that we can do this though we can do it the opposite way if you have a power bi dashboard and you want to embed a powerapp canvas app into that you can do that as well and i know i think greg you've told me before that you use this one quite a bit disintegration yeah this one's been my favorite lately really because i might not be clear from this screenshot but like this this rectangle here the product details that's actually a power app running inside the report but if you've got uh folks that are using a lot of power bi and chances are people that have known using a lot of guys but here inside power bi as you're clicking around maybe you click on one of the data pieces inside the graph it'll narrow down filter that data and then the power app itself gets a filtered view of that data same as anything else inside power bi so it can be super powerful to build an app that lets somebody make a change or somehow otherwise react to the data they're seeing in the report without ever having to leave that report just making it easier for your users to do their thing yeah anything we can do to reduce clicks and people having to go out to different applications to to see data is great and this is a great integration that we can have with power apps and power bi in there all right so on to talking a little bit more about powerapps and power automate so there might be a case where you need to decide what tool to use for what functionality you're trying to accomplish so take the concept of maybe you have an application and you need to send an email now this is actually something that both power apps and power automate can handle so how do you decide to make that decision of which one to do that in so a few different things that you need to think through and consider when you're choosing which tool to use for power apps from that side of things if it's a simple email notification and you don't need a lot of customization in the body of the message then power apps is a good solution for that now the minute though you need to the minute though that you need to have more styling in that with powerapps do that you would have to inject html so uh that is something where maybe power automates would be a better solution um so going on too so we can do the same thing we can send emails but the beauty of that is we have more customization over it so we can easily still customize and control what shows up there without having to write any html and have way more control over that um you don't have a report and you want to still try to show the sort of information inside powerapp you can just add graphs and charts directly into the power app itself powerapps has a graph control this is an example of what it looks like here so if you don't have a full report and you just want to show some of the data that you're pulling through and in a graph which happens a lot inside applications um you can do that directly inside powerapps as well if if you're looking for something like that yes um and also um so you know power bi as well for um you know you can build that and have that into your application uh with powerapps which is great also okay um so i think uh greg do we have our first uh knowledge check for this section here yeah okay so question number two uh and make sure that you're looking at the chat there and putting your answers there uh which of these statements is true about data sources is it a in powerapps app data comes primarily from your local device um is it b powerapps is not able to connect to external data all data must be stored in the powerapps application don't think that's right i think we talked about being able to connect to a bunch of different data sources or is it c powerapps uses connectors to connect to data sources if the data source supports it powerapps can read and write to the data source oh that one's a little tricky so for this one like i don't know a calls out to me a little bit because the app data can come from your local device you can get things like the user's current location or take pictures with the camera and that definitely comes from your your tablet or your phone um b i think is definitely out um but i think i'm feeling c what do you think april yeah c feels right i know i i remember talking about connection connectors there and being able to depending on what connector you use you can read or write to that so that's sounding right to me and let's see what uh um what everyone else thought here looks like was the right answer and it looks like that's we're getting uh by and large by and large a couple folks for a makes sense um but definitely the answer is c all right yeah great job everyone cool and uh greg you're gonna talk a little bit more about ways to build powerapps now yep absolutely so building power apps is one of one of those things that it takes a little bit to get started it takes a little bit of figuring out how the formulas work and how the controls will get added and arranged on in an app and we'll take all look at all that in demo in a little while but what we're talking about building power apps is really three main ways to get started you can create an app from a template or a sample and onsite on the make.powerapps.com site we do have a bunch of template apps that are apps that are i don't want to say ready to go but maybe are 80 to 90 percent of the way there for apps that we've heard from people that they create pretty often whether it's a to do app or an app to help do some budget tracking or uh one of my favorites to um to manage a meeting as far as who's attending the notes you need to take any takeaways and action items from it can be controlled inside that powerapp as well and then you just hit a button and it sends out a bunch of notes and tasks everybody in the meeting that's all inside the templates um you can create a canvas address from blank you can get that one blank screen and then you can go nuts you can create whatever you want that can be a little intimidating at first but once you get familiar with everything you're going to find yourself probably creating some blank more often than not and last but not least you can create a data source and create a powerapp from there so um maybe you can look at pointing to a piece of data inside uh inside dataverse or inside sharepoint or in our demo later we're going to talk about actually just pointing at an excel sheet and with that data powerapps will generate an app for you to get you started and when we talk about no code that's what we're talking about where powerapps will do so much for you that you just need to maybe write a little bit of that low code uh to get you the rest of the way but first off that template so the templates are going to be and we're looking at the budget tracker right here that i mentioned they use sample data that either just lives inside the app itself or maybe points to an excel sheet that we'll then uh put somewhere in your in your onedrive uh to determine what's possible and and help you understand what poweramps is about what you can build how things are put together um this is actually a good example right here in the screenshot of what just a simple graph control looks like um in this case pie graph split three ways uh but that that's from a template where you take something that's there maybe you apply your colors maybe you change a few labels or maybe you add a little bit more and then you send it out to your users ready to go next we have from uh uh from a data source when you go to create a new app you can choose any of the data the sources listed here and you're not limited to just these five and of course you're going to see a lot of microsoft stuff and then if you want to create data from salesforce you can do that as well these are all just examples of our data connectors that can get you data if you click on this arrow here at the end that'll then bring you to the full list of connectors that are available in your environment to pull data from wherever it might be so if you want to start with data and not just these five make sure you click on that arrow but i mentioned sharepoint we should talk to that as well if you want to create an app based on data that is inside sharepoint list either data that's already there or maybe you've got a blank list you want to start put data into you can do that right inside sharepoint you just click that powerapps drop down there at the top click create an app or customize forms and it'll bring up power apps connect the powerapps studio experience directly to your sharepoint data already set up that connection for you and then give you an app that'll be good enough to get you started for uh dealing with that sharepoint data and then you can add whatever other functionality you want to as well on top of that and then last as i mentioned earlier a blank canvas it is a blank canvas um and you can you can make power apps that do just very simple things or you can make power apps that don't even look like a power app and somebody would never know um if they didn't have to run the powerapps app to get to it uh and it's it's entirely up to you so you can you can go crazy or you can start from template or you can start sharepoint or any other data source for that matter there's so many different ways to create these power apps and you can tell i'm i'm excited about it because i mean well it's one of my favorite things to do these days and it's not just it's my job maybe a little bit um but um we'll get into next definitely when you're talking about building a power app you want to design that power up you don't want to dive head first in right away necessarily but you want to maybe give it a little thought about what you're doing first but before we do that there is a question in chat um how from mark how do the connectors or powerapps deal with api calls um april do you want to take that one um yeah well i was going to ask you if you did since i got the last couple questions yeah no okay uh i'll do my part so the so the connectors of powerapps are actually making api calls on the back end um if you use something like a browser dev tools or there there's actually built-in uh tools called the powerapps monitor to see those connections going back and forth what you would see is a connection from the powerapp going out to an azure api managed uh api that's part of the product itself and that server turns around and calls the connectors api whether it's dataverse whether it's sharepoint whether it's salesforce whatever it is so the apis are kind of like a layer underneath those connectors actually doing kind of the low-level data calls and connectors are just a way to um make it easier for for folks that haven't been doing web dev forever uh to understand to get that data and and um do stuff with it and one more question from terry uh can power apps use an existing power bi gateway or does powerapps need its own gateway um now powerapps i i want knowing what i know about power bi and i don't know this one off the top of my head so i apologize for that um the power bi gateways and the gateways we're talking about inside the power platform i think are not quite the same thing um april quirky if i'm wrong yeah so i i'm not a 100 sure either but i believe the gateway works in powerapps and power automate but i think power bi is a bit different um so i don't think it's the exact same as the same gateway that you would use and say powerapps and pyrotomy and that is something that we and the product team had been looking at trying as we go forward um if you see um folks that are running the product or um managing the product talking about one one power platform and kind of getting things to feel like one platform that's what we're talking about you might see some of these overlapping terms that aren't quite the same thing that's because we've had you know things like power bi that have actually been around for a lot longer than the rest of the power platform and the rest of the apps that have kind of come along separately whether it's power apps for automate power virtual agents are all kind of different pages and so we're trying to get them into one uh one kind of lockstep platform is taking a little a little time but we're getting there and when we can look at this sort of thing these sort of things getting easier down the road as time goes on okay well i think that uh that's all the questions there so so far we've talked about what power ups is some of the integration points we talked about the ways that we can build power apps whether it's from template from a data source from blank so now let's get into the designing process how do we go about actually designing a powerapp so there are a few different things that we need to address when it comes to building a solution in powerapps we need to make sure we understand the business requirements the data model the user experience the user interface business logic and output and we'll go into each one of these here so starting with the business requirements and um well let's again let's switch to the next one here and we'll talk about how we can go from building a blank canvas app so as greg mentioned before we have that option to start from lake and it's literally a blanket canvas which can be a little bit overwhelming so how do you go from something like that with nothing on it to something like what we're seeing here a fully baked customizable solution with service deck dust tickets here we can create new ones we can see a dashboard and all of that so where do we start first thing that we have to do for any solution that we're building whether it's powerapps or any other tool we're using is we need to understand the needs of our users so one of the first things that we need to do though is we want to challenge the existing process because it can be tempting to just take say the paper form maybe if that's what you're replacing for an inspection and just replicating that in powerapps because you could probably do it and it's possible but the question is should you um this is your opportunity to really take that process and potentially make it better so the way that we can do that is we can question what the actual business needs are of the users and find ways that we can make the process more efficient my favorite version of that april is the forms that you fill out that so many times will inevitably have that part just maybe in bold maybe at the bottom says this isn't for you don't actually fill this part up right um you know if you're building a power app maybe you only include that top part and then have an approval process or a submission process for then whoever in that next tier whether it's somebody taking in the information or management or whoever is supposed to fill in that part that says don't fill this in um then fills in those those fields either in their own app or maybe a part of the app that you've created that only they can access so that's an idea of forms into an app is a great way to get started and see where those opportunities are but we can do better than just the form once we actually get it inside a inside screen of course exactly or you know another great one um check this if and then if this applies fill out these next 10 questions right a great use case there to improve that process by showing or hiding and only requiring that information if you check that check box or whatever it might be so um you know how do we so we understand the needs how do we get the business requirements because that's the next big step here every application you develop is going to have its own unique set of business requirements that we need to build the solution so things that we might consider here in this aspect what security and privacy and compliance requirements do we have to follow we touched on this a bit earlier with dataverse and the ability to you know restrict fields maybe social security numbers that's a great one that's some personal identifiable information that we might want to restrict and need to make sure we're being really cognizable to secure so if that's a requirement we need to know about it from the get-go what about any you know regulations or authentication authorization requirements someone asked earlier you know is is power apps just for internal users typically so what are those requirements who will need to authenticate and use this application is it internal users in our cust you know company or is it external users that could be a you know a use case for uh powerapps portals like i mentioned earlier so identifying those things from the start is going to help you make sure that you plan out the best solution for that um and then also the last note that we want to you know place here you don't have to know all the answers and have this great you know big process of every possible thing that you might need mapped out you just need to know the basic requirements um okay so the next thing is is offline mode now this um is something that you want to consider so powerapps does offer the ability for us to interact and build in the capability to interact with our applications in an offline scenario so think when you have airplane mode turned on on your phone or you're out in the middle of nowhere and you have no internet signal right we can't do that but you want to make sure that you are identifying that need if you can from the beginning just because it might make it a little bit easier to plan with that in mind that you might need that rather than going in after the fact not to say that you can't build a solution and go in after fact and add an offline capability you definitely can so but just something to consider if that's going to be a requirement because it is a little bit of extra work to add in one thing i'll just add to that too is that for for right now anyway offline mode i'll find capability to to load and and save data to be synchronized later is something that only really works in a power app that runs on your phone or on a tablet right now um it doesn't work if you're running a power app inside a web browser and it doesn't work if you're running it inside the current windows uh windows app that's something that they're going to be bringing to the windows app soon so if you're using windows tablet things like that something to think about as uh as you're uh planning what you're at all right so data model this is the next big decision once you have your business requirements you need to figure out where you're actually going to store your data and what data you need to interact with so one of the cool things about powerapps being we can actually mix and match and have data from various different sources uh data sources in one single application so you know first identifying what data sources do i need to connect to maybe it's sharepoint or dynamics or an excel you know sheet on a one drive whatever it might be identifying where the data is and how you need to consume it in your application um also you know what be mindful of maybe where your users are day-to-day if they are in sharepoint right now and already interacting with the sharepoint list to store some information about you know budget requests or whatever it might be um you know we can integrate that in with the sharepoint connector uh within our applications here and it doesn't have to be just one data source we can mix and match and as we mentioned earlier dataverse might be a great use case for that as well you know if you're starting scratch from scratch and just want a secure and easy to manage place to store your data and make sure that you're considering two because we kind of briefly touched on the licensing aspect of things earlier um so make sure when you're flushing all this out that you are considering the licensing costs you know with dataverse um being having to have that additional licensing there so just make sure that you kind of think all of that through from the data model perspective and that's actually something that you brought up a great point april if your users are used to going to sharepoint maybe sharepoint is also your internet and they get a lot of information from there you could always embed your powerapps onto a sharepoint page whether or not it's actually talking to sharepoint data now if it is talking to sharepoint data great if it needs to pull from dataverse or if it wants to pull from dataverse and sharepoint and twitter for example you can do that as well so but you do need to figure out um what the best case is for your particular app and more importantly your your users yeah or maybe your users are in teams and so that could be a great use case for the dataverse for teams you're embedding your your powerapp and teams so just some things to consider um from that end you know so next once you have your your data model and your business requirements and all that figured out now you need to really start honing in and thinking about the user experience so with canvas apps giving us that complete control um over the user experience um it can be a little bit overwhelming like how do i know what to put on here and how to really build this out so one of the main points i want to make here is just because you can doesn't necessarily mean you should it can't be tempting to put everything you could possibly need in one application i really like the philosophy of keeping it simple as simple as possible you want to make sure that people coming into the application that you built for the first time it makes sense for them it's intuitive and they don't really need to go read along documentation to figure out how to use the app right just making sure that it's really simple to follow and intuitive um other things to consider from you know design um side of things you want to you typically make sure that your applications kind of match your customer branding so maybe your company colors and logos another cool thing we can do is maybe pop-ups um and showing your hiding buttons you know greg mentioned you might have sections of a form if you're replicating one where it only applies to this group of people we can sure hide that using some conditions easily um you know so an example of what the a good ux would look like um here and we look at a survey one if we go uh to the next slide there so we have a class survey we can have a rating control with stars rating the survey and when we click submit if we go to the next screen this shows a great element design element here of a pop-up so one of the easiest things we can do from user experience side of things is making sure we're always communicating to our users so we gave a quick message that hey your survey was submitted successfully great job and they have the option to close out the form so it goes a lot a long way from user experience side of things and uh and then user interface so you know when you're trying to figure out how to build out your application uh there are a few tools that we can use to kind of create what we call a mock-up or just a kind of a sketch of how we want to interact with the app and how it should be laid out so two tools that you can use are either vizio or powerapps so a lot of us have vizio and use that you know for you know processing process mapping and all that so that's definitely an option the one that i kind of like though i don't know about you greg is i'm kind of partial to just mocking it up in powerapps because it is so simple to drag your controls in there you can really just create the layout of how you want everything to be in power-ups itself and then come in after the fact and kind of add in the the data in that logic that we talked about yeah that is actually my favorite thing is do it inside inside powerapps because it like you just mentioned it's so easy to do that but i've seen folks do it inside powerpoint or even design pen and you know pencil and paper um all these are totally valid ways to go definitely vizio powerapps is not the the only way to go but let's let's take a look at visio yeah i mean so the video is a great tool for creating these kind of mock-ups you know being able to have a wireframe like like you see here um easily visualize what the screen could look like um so great way to do that and kind of an example of what that could look like um you know but the same thing um you know mock-up we could do in power apps just uh just as easily as you're seeing here so we can have our controls laid out and again the benefit of doing it this way is um you're not duplicating any effort you're not creating the mock-up and vizio and then having to go do that in the power app you can do it in one spot and not duplicate as much effort so just something to consider there yeah this is this app that we're looking at here could be completely laid out without any data being pulled in yet it couldn't and they could show it to other people you could publish the app just with the one screen and say this is what it's going to look like what do you think what would you change and then iterate real quickly inside the power app itself um is really one of the more powerful things you can do yep all right so next we need to discuss business logic and we kind of talked about this earlier when we're talking about dataverse because this is a really a place where dataverse really shines when it comes to business rules and validation um so say a scenario where you have a a field and if that's checked then you want to require approval from someone right um we can use business rules in dataverse to enforce that at the data level rather than in the powerapp so say we went power apps and we said okay if you click this checkbox then make this field required right you have to fill that in we can do that in the powerapp level but the problem is what if we're using that data in another powerapp you know maybe we have multiple ones that business validation that rule isn't applied there but it can be if we use the business rules that dataverse offers uh and then finally output i'm just going to touch on that regularly make sure that you're considering what do i need to do with the data that the app is collecting and where it's going to be stored do i need to report off of it be mindful of that so that you can make sure that you're architecting your data on your app in a way that the output of the data will be easy to work with and report off of for your requirements and um just just an example of what that could look like here from an output perspective we could even use say powerapps and power automate together to export data to a csv if that's part of your requirements so that you can import that into another system or work with it so lots of possibilities that we have here just make sure when you're you know sketching out your application your solution that you're being mindful of what the ultimate output needs to be like um and with that i think greg you have a

2021-03-21 23:01

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