What is Power Apps?
As many of you know, I work for Microsoft as a Power Platform Premier Field Engineer. My role is to instruct our customers on how to use this platform as well as assist them with troubleshooting and strategy based upon our recommended practices. Power Apps is one component that comprises the Power Platform. Power Automate is the other piece that I specialize in, but we discuss that in a future article.
Power Apps was created in 2018 and is our ‘Low-code/no-code’ app development platform. I am not a developer so this is good news for me :) The product groups who created this platform borrowed elements of two of our most widely known products “PowerPoint” and “Excel”. When are are in the Power Apps Studio you will notice that it resembles Power Point. Both have a middle area (Canvas) and side navigation which represents the slides, or in the case of Power Apps, the app screens you are working on. Take a look at the side-by-side comparison below of Power Point and Power Apps.
Side-by-side comparison of PowerPoint and Power Apps
In regards to formulas, notice how similar the syntax is between Power Apps and Excel. The purpose of doing this was to lower the learning curve for Power Apps since many customers have been using Power Point and Excel for years.
Formula Comparison of Power Apps and Excel
This platform is literally drag and drop like Power Point and within minutes you can create an app. This app below is a Device Ordering app and was created with one of our templates. Many customers have used it, with a few tweaks, to serve their own purposes. I, as well as some of my customers, reverse-engineered it to learn how to use Power Apps.
This is a very fun and exciting platform to use because of the speed of which you can see results. Now, with everything there is a double-edged sword, in this case it is governance. In my next article I will discuss some strategies for governance because within an organization, Power Apps can quickly proliferate because of the ease of its use, but there must be some checks and balances
If you would like to learn more about Power Apps, stay tuned, I will continue to share my Power Apps adventures. Here are some additional resources:
Power Apps guided learning path