Power Apps Tutorial

Power Apps is a component of the Microsoft Power platform. The Power platform also includes PowerBI and PowerFlow. Microsoft promotes it as a stack.

Power Apps is a service-oriented application used for developing custom apps for your organization. It simplifies the development cycle of the business apps and equips the business users and developers to build custom native, mobile, and web applications.

The reviving user interface of Power Apps helps us create simple apps quickly. Through Power Apps templates, we can customize our applications.

With Power Apps, we can connect to our company data coming from Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Office365, etc. Top companies like Wipro, TOYOTA, and American Red Cross use Microsoft Powerapps for building and customizing their business applications.

So, if you want to make a promising career in app development, you can enroll in our Power Apps training.

According to ziprecruiter.com, the average salary of a Powerapps developer in the US is around $113K per annum. In this Power Apps Tutorial, we will first learn what Powerapps is and then study its needs and applications. 

In this Power Apps tutorial, we will start from the basics of Power Apps and learn all the major Power Apps concepts that a Power Apps professional must be aware of. Now, let’s have a look at the components of this tutorial.

What is Power Apps?

Power Apps is a collection of programs, applications, services, and data platforms that enable rapid application development. With the help of Power Apps, we can build and personalize business apps quickly, without depending on IT Professionals and Programmers.

Applications developed through Power Apps provide abundant workflow and business logic abilities to make your manual business automated. Users can subscribe to Microsoft Power Apps in office 365, Dynamics 365, or as an independent product.

Need and Importance of Power Apps

Microsoft introduced Power Apps to overcome the following problems:

• Lack of professional mobile app developers: Gartner forecasted that the demand for mobile app developers would increase at least five times more compared to the IT organization's ability to deliver. The reason for this situation is the deficiency of professional mobile app developers to meet the requirement.
• Expansion of business data: Business data is expanded across various systems and exceeded the firewall and SaaS cloud. As data is stored in various systems, we cannot access the data from the app.
• App sharing and IT Activities: Mobile apps are distributed through app stores and mobile devices. This established an inheritance methodology to get the app onto the mobile device now.

Microsoft Power Apps

With the help of Power Apps, we can build and personalize business apps quickly, without depending on IT Professionals and Programmers. Users can subscribe to Microsoft Power Apps in office 365, Dynamics 365, or as an independent product.

Power Apps can be classified into three categories; they are:

• The App itself.
• Connections to your data.
• Flows: Workflows thrown by apps.

1. The App Itself

Through Power Apps, We can create any app for mobiles, tablets, or desktops. The developed apps perform some general functions based on the template. Customization of apps can turn into more specialized and specific. PowerApp studio can create and modify the layout the same as with the App. In addition to templates, we can also develop the apps from scratch to get more adaptability concerning the application’s flow.

2. Connectors to the Data

While creating an app through a template, Power Apps queries about the data source that you want to use for your App, some of the accessible data sources are:

• Salesforce
• Dynamics 365
• Sharepoint list.

For instance, if we want to develop an app that performs some operations on the contacts of the client, then we have to develop the application on SharePoint.

Developing mobile applications through Power Apps will take only a few clicks. For customizing and prioritizing the data, we can use the drag-and-drop mechanism. After creating the App, you will have separate screens for browsing records and displaying the details of documents.

3. Microsoft Flow

Microsoft flow is the primary engine running behind the apps you run. An app is defined as a collection of many automated processes or workflows. An app is created to do certain operations on the data. Flow teaches us how our apps should perform these operations. To run our app on our device, we should install a Power Apps app on our machine.

Microsoft Flow automates various repetitive tasks, which enables you to dedicate more time to essential tasks. In addition to automation, we can establish API connectors and gateways for traditional solutions through the sophisticated integration tools of Power Apps.

Microsoft Power Apps is useful in various industries like Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, and Information Technology (IT) as it can automate any routine task.

Advantages of Microsoft Flow

Through Microsoft Flow, we can perform the following things easily:

• Establishing the workflows to receive notifications and handling the work.
• Applying various connectors to interchange the data between SharePoint and other Microsoft or different third-party services.
• Create items and custom APIs.
• Using the SharePoint list, we can create CRM entities.
• We can share the data between SharePoint and Dropbox, one drive, etc.

Working on Microsoft Flow

To create a workflow, Microsoft Flow provides various templates to create the workflow immediately. If we cannot find a suitable template for a specific task, we can create a template that meets our requirements.

Installation of  Microsoft Flow has been explained in detail click here

What are the Main Functions of Power Apps?

The main functions of Power Apps are as follows:

1. Power Apps Search Function

Power Apps Search function is used to locate the records which contain the required string. The string can occur anywhere in the column.

The syntax of the search function is as follows: Search( Table, RequiredString, Column):

• Table: This field refers to the table to be searched.
• RequiredString: This field refers to the string to be searched.
• Column: This field refers to the column within the table to be searched.

Example:

Search(Employ, “esh” . Emp_Name)

As the “esh” string is present in every Column of the Emp_Name field, the search function returns a complete table.

2. Power Apps Filter Function

The Power Apps filter function is used to locate the records which fulfill a particular Formula or a condition.

Syntax:

Filter(Table, Formula)

• Table: This field refers to the table to be searched.
• Formula: The formula by each record of the table is assessed.

Example:

The Power Apps Filter function is applied to the above Employ Table in the following way:

Filter(Employ, Emp_Salary>25000)

Lookup( Employ, Emp_ID=”03”, Emp_Salary)

What are the Applications of Power Apps?

• Power Apps contain azure app service so that employees can get the mobile apps quickly onto their devices.
• We can build new connections to the already existing business systems and thus enabling any employee of the organization to develop their apps.
• Power Apps honors privacy and data security issues to maintain data access and corporate policies.

Conclusion

Power Apps allows you to speed up the development process of business apps. Time for developing apps can be reduced from months to minutes. Power Apps allows organizations or businesses to have their own group of app developers and designers. These developers and designers can develop apps that can provide a suitable solution for their organizations.