What can you do with Power Apps?

Power Apps is the best way to innovate quickly for fast results that has a user-friendly interface for your applications. It has the data connections and collection that your application could integrate with.

With the Power Apps designer, you’ll have a lot of possibilities to connect like for example, with SharePoint online. It would be able to provide you an awesome experience in creating the apps that give you the liberty to add labels, dropdowns, tables, images, and just about any other common user interface control that you can think of. 

All your application development would be taken care of by Power Apps. You could publish your app, and your users will automatically have access to the latest and great version. 

Here are some of the noteworthy things you can do with Power Apps.

There are readily available templates, but you could customize yours. What you need to do is just go to Power Apps portals to create, and you’ll see a lot of files that contain three files to create your app and 28 ready-made applications. They already have the solutions for specific areas like Help Desk, Budget Tracker, Leave Request and more. All you need to do is to click on them to be able to add them to your environment and be able to use them at once.

Furthermore,  you could edit them and see how they’re were built. It’s a great way to know the app structure, logic, user controls, and functions to learn the Power Apps. Besides, you can copy app parts and paste them into your solution. 

If you’re a beginner, start with templates with the “Canvas app” label. There are also two two app templates you should check on, the Power Apps Training and Power Apps Training for Office, and get to know your way to Power Apps.

There are many controls and properties in Power Apps. For controls, there is the Text input, Slider, and Timer as just a few examples. Use them to interact with a user in multiple ways, such as display information, gather some data or even record video or take a picture. 

All controls are under the Insert ribbon tab and grouped in categories such as Text, Controls, and Media. Discover controls as well as the more complex ones like in forms. 

Controls have properties for customization, and it extends the capabilities of the controls that make them very useful in multiple ways and different contexts. See label, text input, icons, button, gallery, forms under control. 

You could click on Functions to be able to interact with other users. Controls, properties, ad functions are Power Apps soul for you to know and use better. Power Apps have 155 functions that are fully explained on what it does, when to use it, required arguments, and some usage examples. Some functions are User, Param, Language, HashTags, ColorFade, and PlainText. 

Power Apps is truly powerful as its essence lies with its integration with other platforms. It means your app could use the capabilities of another service and could be looked at as a way to borrow the power of other services. Power Apps contains over 230 connectors to different services aside from just Microsoft.

You could also store data in the right place with Power Apps. You could use OneDrive (Excel), SharePoint, and common database (CDS, SQL). CDS made huge progress and is a safe and trustworthy relational database.

Use delegation mechanism in Power Apps as well. You could find it in the documentation.

Be able to turn on the advanced settings if you wish to build your apps more efficiently and faster. There are few options hidden from you by default. But as an app maker, you could easily turn them on.

Just go to File, then App Settings, and finally to Advanced settings. There are cool functionalities that will boost your productivity, such as Components, and it’s a group of controls that you could reuse across screens and apps. It’s like building your control, and the Formula bar result view and turning it on would allow you to see the first few results right in your formula bar. 

You can also add extra content and reuse components like tab control, calendar, dialog box, map control, and more. You could check on the Experimental tools from Microsoft like the Power Apps Review Tool, Theme Editor, App Merger, Phone to Tablet Layout Converter as well. 

You get to work, interact, and build apps with your team. Your app-building could be very rewarding as you get to discover, learn, and experience a lot with Power Apps.

Start to create now as it always starts with a simple step with Power Apps.

After Thoughts

We always need to keep up with the demand of technology nowadays to stay in the loop and relevant. Times are changing fast, and we must be adaptable and flexible in the digital convenience that’s presented to us.

As the world evolves, we should evolve with it. Power Apps comes in very useful as you quickly build and share low-code apps that would provide solutions to your business needs.

Cloudtrend is a Microsoft partner. Our company offers consulting services for building Power Apps. Contact us today for a free consultation.

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