Microsoft Power Apps Beginner Tutorial Under 30 Mins #PowerApps

what's up everyone april here welcome or welcome back to my channel where we talk all things the power platform and microsoft 365. recently i did an introduction to dataverse video and after the great response i had to that i did a poll asking you all what intro video would you like me to do next and the overwhelming majority of you said powerapps now for all of you watching my channel you probably know that i love powerapps so i was quite surprised to look back at my content and realize that i've never did an introduction to powerapps video yet so it's time to remedy that i want to keep this as short and sweet as possible but i want to cover what powerapps is the different types of powerapps that we can create some of the high level concepts and how to get started all that coming up right after this well first things first what is powerapps exactly what's a no code low code platform for building applications and with powerapps we can build not only desktop applications but also applications that work on your mobile devices and your tablet devices all this being done without having to know a traditional programming language like say c sharp or javascript and so describe how powerapps works how you're actually able to build applications with a low code technology i like to describe it as powerapps as if excel and powerpoint fell 11 had a baby and that would be powerapps and the reason that i say this is the design interface for powerapps canvas apps specifically which we'll talk a little bit more about later on is very powerpoint like it's a simple to use office experience where you can drag and drop controls into the screen and build out the layout of your application now the logic layer is really based off of excel we might have saw a previous video that i had and i'll put a link to that up here on power fx that is powerapp's canvas app's low code programming language and it's actually based off of microsoft excel's language that it uses for its formulas and expressions so when you need to do some complex logic inside of your application and powerapps you could use an excel like expression to say filter data that shows from your data source so that's why it's really the perfect marriage of if excel in powerpoint had a baby that would be what the experience is like to create a power app and we'll take a look at how that works here later on now powerapps is part of microsoft's power platform suite of tools so with the power platform this is a holistic suite of loco technology that microsoft offers to do not only low code application development but also to do things like dashboard and reporting with the tool that we have called power bi and to do things like building low code chat bots with a tool called power virtual agents and the glue that kind of binds all these together is our workflow and process automation tool in the power platform called power automate so that's the great thing about when you choose powerapps to build an application is by design by choosing that you also get to take advantage of all of the other functionality that we have in the power platform to do things like extending your application and adding in some business logic and workflow to it in dashboard reporting and even chat bots one of the other great things about the power platform and powerapps is that it's not only a no-co low-code technology but you can also inject some of your code first traditional development into the platform to extend it even further so what we like to say here is it's truly a no cliffs experience as far as what you can do with it and how you can extend it if you haven't caught my intro to dataverse video be sure to check that out as well because the power platform sits on top of dataverse and it's a key component of the power platform and powerapps so definitely check that out to get your 101 level primer on daniverse itself but one of the things that really makes the power platform and powerapps even more powerful is the concept of something called data connectors so we currently have about 500 different built-in connectors that we can use across all the power platforms so this is our power apps and our power automate solutions workflows that we create power bi and power virtual agents and what this really means is if we were to say build an application the traditional way with some c-sharp or javascript code then anytime you want to integrate with various services whether it be maybe google drive or salesforce or dropbox or microsoft office whatever it might be we would have to go through the process of coding in those authentications and integrations into the services what the power platform offers however is a way for you to easily plug and play into over 500 different services without having to do anything except say drop that connector in and authenticate into it so that really opens up the doors to the types of scalable solutions that you can create connecting to all kinds of different data and these connectors are not only for microsoft services this is for all kinds of services of course microsoft services like sharepoint and teams and dynamics and all of that are supported but as you can see here we offer support through this data connector model for all kinds of services like even competing services like google docusign adobe sign social media applications like twitter and linkedin so really the possibilities are almost endless because not only do we have all of these built-in data connectors that we can start using but we also give you the ability to connect to your own internal services or other apis that might be out there that don't currently have a connector and we do that with something called custom connectors so we give you the ability to take an api and make your own connector to that so that you can consume and write data back to that and this data doesn't even have to be data that's on the cloud we have something called an on-prem data gateway which will allow you to create a connector and connect to data behind your firewall on a physical server somewhere and this is one of the great benefits of building your applications in powerapps is the time savings that you get because we don't have to worry about coding in all these various integrations we're able to save a substantial amount of time that it takes to actually build the applications now we need to talk about the types of power apps that we can create i do actually have a video on the types of power apps explained but that video is more than a year old now so i thought it was time for a refresh so i'll just cover that here in this intro to powerapps video there are three main types of powerapps that we have that we're able to create the one that i probably most commonly talk about on my channel are canvas applications and they're called canvas applications because it literally gives you a blank canvas that you can drag and drop and have complete control over the user experience of your application so this would be an internal facing custom app because one of the concepts that we need to make sure we understand when we're talking about building applications with powerapps is the scope at which that application is intended for with powerapps canvas apps the scope for this would be people within your company or your tenants where you have your microsoft 365 environment powerapps canvas apps right now are not something that you would take and publish to the apple or google app stores and put out broadly like that to several external users these are for your internal business applications but with these canvas apps as i said we have complete control over the user experience it's very powerpoint like which we'll take a look at here in a second where we can drag and drop different controls on the screen and get an app set up one of the distinguishing things about canvas apps and why they're so commonly used is that they have full support for those data connectors that i just mentioned so if you need to build some kind of mobile application or desktop application that is maybe pulling in and surfacing up information say for maybe your salesforce system maybe also information from dynamics servicenow you name it you need to mix and match a lot of these different data sources in one application then the canvas app would be your choice for that because we're able to mix and match the different data sources and use multiple data sources in our applications now when we talk about canvas applications there's this concept of building a responsive application and what that really means is when we get down to it is we build the application once and it's able to respond its width and height accordingly based off of the device you're on so whether you're on a desktop a wide screen monitor or maybe you're on a more narrow portrait mode phone powerapps out of the box when you build a canvas app here it's not responsive natively but we do have capability to make the app responsive so we have support when you build a power app it will work on a desktop on a mobile and on a tablet device but if you want to take it that extra step farther and make it truly responsive and optimize the experience then we can do some additional logic and code in there to make that happen the other cool thing about our canvas applications is we have widgets and ways that we can embed these applications easily inside of your sharepoint internets and inside of microsoft teams now moving on to model driven applications now these are similar to canvas apps in that they are internal facing for people in your organization those tenant wide organizational business apps but where it differs is the amount of control we have over the ui and the type of data sources we can use so model driven apps are kind of what we call data first design and they're very tightly coupled to dataverse so how i like to describe it is model driven apps are good for internal facing kind of like database dashboard admin panel type situations so rather than dragging or dropping multiple controls you start with your data so maybe i want to create an application to see all of the data in my clients list in all the orders that those clients have made and to be able to easily manage that information maybe i'll have a dashboard that i want to see of the orders that we have to date things like that well that's a good use case for a model driven application then so we do have limited ui control it kind of configures the design for us when we point it to the different data that we want to consume and use in our application we can do things like add in custom controls using something called the powerapps component framework so we do have a little bit of control that we can have there as far as you know the colors and being able to put in some custom controls but not nearly as much control over the ui as we have with canvas applications these model driven apps though are responsive out of the box so they will work on your desktop tablet and mobile devices without you having to do anything extra and finally we have something called power portals now these differ pretty greatly from our canvas and our model driven apps so canvas and model driven are for you know mobile desktop applications but powerapps portals are basically a way with low code technology for you to build a website so with portals we're able to have even anonymous and external access just like we would traditional websites with this technology now similar to model german apps the data that we actually surface up and consume inside of our power portals is going to be tied to dataverse so it again is tightly coupled to dataverse so you need to pull in data from there we do have more control over the ui than we do in model driven apps here and that's because you can inject and use html and css in the powerapps portals and because of that because we're able to have html and css and have a little bit more control over that we're able to make these responsive as well so that's kind of a high level summary of the main types of applications that we can build in power apps and the use cases for each so let's take a look at how we actually get started powerapps is part of microsoft 365. so you will need the appropriate microsoft 365 license to be able to use powerapps most enterprise licenses and even some of the business premium skus include a version of powerapps that you can use i don't want to get too into the weeds of licensing here there is a licensing guide that i'll put a link to in the video description which goes through the ins and outs about how much all this cost and what type of microsoft 365 license you will need to be able to use powerapps generally most e-level licenses and some of the education licenses include a base version of powerapps if you want to do some of the advanced or what we call premium functionality in power apps like say using model driven applications using some premium connectors then you'll need to pay for a power apps license the way that we license that currently is either by application or by user the by user meaning you can license a particular user for an unlimited amount of powerapps applications so if you're going to be using this for a lot of applications that would be the way to go pricing was recently reduced for that and that is twenty dollars a user a month and then the per app plan is you license up a single application per user so if you're only wanting to push out one application or one or two apps for a handful of users then that's going to be your cheapest route which is five dollars per application per user now what if you don't actually have a microsoft 365 license but you want to try out powerapps and see if it's a good fit for your application that you're wanting to build well there's basically a two-step process that you can go through to get a complete powerapps developer environment created so you can start building applications and testing that out the first step is going to be to sign up for the microsoft 365 developer plan this basically gives you a free enterprise license of microsoft 365 that not only includes microsoft teams and sharepoint but also all of the power platform applications that's power apps power automate power bi and power virtual agents and the great thing is you don't have to worry about any hidden cost here you don't have to buy a domain you don't have to put in a credit card anything like that you just give some basic information and it creates a new development microsoft 365 tenant now once you have that set up and you go through the process of creating this account and you're logged in to your new microsoft 365 dev tenant you can do one more step and sign up for the powerapps developer plan what this does is get you one of those premium licenses for powerapps that i was talking about that way you can test out all of the functionality of powerapps from model driven apps to those premium data connectors and dataverse and all of that so this is something that you put on top of your microsoft 365 developer plan you can click the existing user option and you can actually add this into your dev environment easily so if you're logged in already all you have to do is going to recognize you you can click accept and this will go set up a powerapps special developer environment for you with all of the premium functionality so don't let the fact that you may or may not have a microsoft 365 license stop you from trying out power-ups now with that out of the way let's take a look at what powerapps looks like so once we're logged in to our office 365 we should see on the left hand side here an option for powerapps and that will open up the powerapps portal another way we can get to this is by opening up a browser tab and going to make.

powerapps. com and this ul is where all of the magic happens so from this one screen we can build a canvas app a model driven app or a portal as you're seeing here now there are a few different ways that we can start creating an application so we can start with our data as you're seeing up here so if i know i want to create an application that is maybe tied to an excel spreadsheet that i have created already if i do the start from data option it's actually going to create a simple three screen application for me so you see it's actually going to show the different sharepoint sites that i have and my onedrive and i can look and see any excel workbooks that i have like this flooring inventory one for example and then it's going to show me the tables that i have within a workbook so for this to work you do have to have your data formatted in excel on a table so i have one table called flooring estimates and i can click connect and really here within a matter of minutes this is going to create a fully functioning application for me based off of the data that i have in that excel table so you see when i do this it's going to open up the powerapps canvas studio where i can have that powerpoint as experience for creating an application now if we look on the left we have screens screens are just how we organize and structure our canvas application so this is an example of a canvas app so as you can see here we have three different screens we have one screen called a browse which is surfacing up the information and the data from our excel table we have a screen called details which is showing the data for a specific record in that table and then we have a screen called edit which is actually enabling us to add data and edit data for a particular row in that excel workbook we can test our applications easily in the editor by clicking this play button at the upper right hand corner and you can see not only can i scroll through all of the different data that i have in excel if i click on one of these like this tile here this marble is going to take me to that detail screen where i can see all the information about this particular item and i can even click the pencil which will take me to the edit screen so that i can override and make any changes so that's a simple way to get started and kind of see the ins and outs of how a canvas app works is by doing the start from data and starting with some kind of excel or sharepoint data that you might have already and hopefully this looks sort of familiar to you the look and feel is very similar to the office applications or like powerpoint you see we have at the top here in the ribbon we have an insert tab and this is where we can add all the different types of controls that we have available to us in a canvas app and these types of controls range from buttons and labels to different types of inputs like an html text we can actually inject html and css into our apps with that control we have rich text editors pin inputs so that we can collect electronic signatures and all kinds of other inputs like drop downs slider controls ratings toggle buttons check boxes all the typical controls that you would expect in a form or in an application we have a concept of a gallery which is what we're seeing on this page a gallery is just a way that we can surface up a list of data we also have forms which is what you're seeing here on this screen it's just a way to create a simple input form to intake data we also have several different media controls we can take advantage of we can add in images into our applications we have a camera control to have an interactive camera to take pictures inside of our apps we can embed videos and audio we even have barcode scanning that uses your mobile or tablet's device native barcode scanning functionality to enable you to do things like do a quick inventory app and scanning those barcodes we're able to record audio with a microphone control view pdfs and we even have integration with maps being able to embed that and mixed reality with our 3d viewer object and then adding in all kinds of fun icons that we can use for different things like navigation between different screens in our application and you'll notice a tab here for ai builder this is some additional functionality that we have as part of the power platform and powerapps to infuse some artificial intelligence capabilities into our applications so without me having to write a line of code i can do things right out of the box like input a business card and have this pre-trained ai model that's part of ai builder automatically detect all of the text in that business card and say add it to my dynamics database over here on the left hand side you'll see our data tab this is where we can have the power to mix and match all kinds of data sources using those connectors that we have so in addition to dataverse if we expand this connectors tab we'll see all of those 500 different data connectors that we have we can add those into our powerapp for anything from twitter as you're seeing to salesforce dynamics all we have to do is search for the data that we want to bring in the type of connector add that into our app and start using it so here's an example of what a canvas app will look like so this particular application i've optimized it for the mobile device but it works just fine here on my desktop so i have it open i'm able to see a dashboard i can book an appointment so i have multiple screens with the calendar control i can move through i can find open desks we have images that it supports and the same app i can use and pull up on my mobile device and that's done by using the powerapps application on your ios or android device now let's take a look at a model driven application and one thing i wanted to point out here on the make. powerapps.