Course Introduction
Overview of Canvas Apps, Model-Driven Apps & Portals
Building your First Canvas App
Building Your First Model-Driven App
Building your First Portal App
Other Power Apps Components
Course Conclusion
The course is part of this learning path
Microsoft Power Apps is a low-code/no-code solution that allows professional developers and non-IT professionals to create powerful applications much faster than with regularly developed applications. In this course, we will look at the core capabilities of Power Apps and how they help businesses automate and enhance repetitive, mundane, and time-consuming tasks.
We will cover canvas apps, model-driven apps, and portals, as well as their use cases and the differences between them. We'll also walk you through how to build each one. Finally, we'll take a look at the Power Apps Component Framework and how this allows developers to add even more functionality to standard Power Apps.
Learning Objectives
- Get a foundational understanding of canvas apps, model-driven apps, and portals, including their use cases and features
- Use data sources, controls, and formulas to build, share, and publish your own canvas apps
- Plan, build, share, and publish model-driven apps
- Create and customize your own portal and monitor user behavior on your portal
- Learn about the Power Apps Framework and how it can enhance the user experience of your apps
Intended Audience
This course is intended for both IT professionals and non-technical professionals looking to automate and enhance business processes for mobile and desktop users.
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites for this course but any computer coding knowledge and even basic Excel knowledge would be beneficial when learning about Power Apps.
A great way to learn Power Apps is of course by doing it yourself. So during this and all other app-building lectures, feel free to follow along with me. If you don't have a license to use Power Apps, you can get a free trial at Powerapps.microsoft.com We'll start out in the app maker studio and Ill click on Canvas app from blank. We'll name our app, first application. And we'll leave the format as tablet, then I'll click create.
In this lecture, we're going to learn how to connect to a data source. For our example, let's say we're wanting to create an application that shows all the employees in my company. So, let's connect to a SharePoint list called, employee List. If I click on the cylinder, I can see all the different data sources that my application is connected to.
To add a new data source, I'll click on add data. The data source we want to connect to is a SharePoint list. To get to SharePoint, I can click on connectors, and then scroll down until I see SharePoint. I'll select the SharePoint connection I'd like. You can have multiple connections to SharePoint with different accounts. If this were my first time connecting to SharePoint, I'd have to create a connection meaning allow Power Apps to use my credentials to connect to SharePoint.
Next, I'll select the SharePoint site I'd like to connect to. Again, if this is your first time connecting to SharePoint, you'll need to enter the SharePoint site U.R.L of the site you'd like to connect to. For now, I'll choose one of my recent sites called, showcase H.R. Here, I am seeing a list of all the different lists and libraries I can connect to. I'll select our example employee list and hit connect.
Now, I can reference and connect to this data source. A simple example of doing this would be adding a gallery and then for the data source property of my gallery, selecting my SharePoint list. When connecting to S.Q.L, Dataverse, or other similar data sources, the process will be very similar to the one I just showed. In the next lecture, we'll integrate controls to design a great user experience.
Ben is a Power Apps and Power Automate Specialist for Sovereign SP and has been using Power Apps, Power Automate, and SharePoint since 2017. Since then, he has built 100+ solutions using these amazing Microsoft tools. He loves helping others realize what technology can do and how it helps automate and enhance business processes. Most of all, though, he loves how these tools help make people’s jobs easier. The phrase, “This will make things so much easier!” is why he's in the IT business.
Ben Fetters lives in South Ogden, Utah, with his amazing wife and brand-new baby girl. A Weber State University Business Administration graduate, he loves to create businesses and help current businesses improve.